by Mary Karr
Thus junior high seems a series of mishaps that vault you involuntarily from one mudhole to another—each time landing deeper, more remote.
Suddenly it’s ninth grade. You’re standing before Lead Head Briggs inside the closed door of his office, remembering you’d learned to spell the word principal from a book that said, The principal is your pal. Briggs has gone through the formality of opening his mail while you wait. He performs this same drill for anyone sent to his office more than once—slitting the sides of envelopes with a silver letter opener, blowing inside to make it easy to draw out the pages. He hopes the interval will unnerve you, as if he could punk you any worse. You’re standing there waiting to be expelled for questioning the validity of studying algebra one more year.
Now he’s taking his Ben Franklin glasses from the edge of his nose. Under his gray crew cut above one ear, you can see the old scar where they put the plate in his head. He’s telling you that you’ll need math more than you know.
Actually, you say, I intend to be a poet, sir.
A what? he says.
A poet, you say. Down the hall, an electric typewriter start its machine gun then halts. He seems to wait till the carriage zings its return and the hammering starts up again.
Then he says, How’s that exactly?
Somebody who writes poems.
Well I know that, but how do you plan to get folks to pay you for it?
This stumps you a minute. Finally, you say, I’ll sell my books. Before him on the wide desk there’s a gold football mounted, gold pens at a slant in a granite holder. Behind his bristly head are the framed pictures of football teams past.
How much you think that’ll make you? he says.
Come again, sir?
Let me put it to you another way, he finally says. How many books of poetry do you think the average American buys?
You see where he’s going, and you jack up the number you give him. In my house? Maybe thirty or forty, you say.
And your house is usual, he says.
There’s the low simmer of worry now, for no one would call your house usual. When you eke out your yes, your throat tightens on the word.
I don’t think your house is usual, Miss Karr. (He hisses the Miss.) Maybe there’s one book of poems inside every two houses, he says. Or to be generous, let’s go on and say a book of poems in every house.
You’re speechless a second. You want to say he’s being unfair. But you can’t quite locate the unfairness of it. He knows you can’t outright say that people in Leechfield are boneheads and don’t really constitute your audience (something that you’ll grow up to believe untrue). That would implicate him and constitute insult. You peel the bottom of one sweaty thigh up from where its stuck to the chair naugahyde and tug down your skirt.
He says, So, that’ll be your book, then. That single book, the one every family buys. That’ll be your book instead of—oh let’s say, Mr. Longfellow. The sudden reference sends the opening lines of “Hiawatha” jogging through your head on its dogged, pentameter-paced horse. He’s not the first person to suggest that poets don’t earn much, but your parents never give that concern the slightest credence. “Shit, you can do whatever you feel like, Pokey,” Daddy would say (an endorsement vague enough to have begun fading in power), while your mother would claim those idiots wouldn’t know poetry from piss ants.
Briggs waves his hand saying, Let’s drop the poet thing. Get back to everything that’s right with math. It’s true you don’t need math to write poetry. But any other task you undertake will require a thorough grounding in mathematics. Especially in the space age.
This stupefies you. You aren’t even being a smartass when you say, Like what?
This is the very cue he’s been waiting for. He says, You’ll need math to measure out your recipes. Say your husband needs you to have a dinner party. You’re gonna have to double or triple what it says in your cookbook. You’ll have to multiply all those parts, not just three eggs or four cups, either. Lots of halves and thirds. There’s your math! (He points his index finger down at his calendar and stabs it so hard you peer over to see if there was some bug he’s smashing. There isn’t.)
You know better than to invite him into the various lives you’ve constructed for yourself—an apartment in New York, a beachcomber’s hut, a Victorian mansion surrounded by a mazelike garden. Your own silence nudges you to the edge of tears. To speak would be to release them.
His final sentence to you, which he delivers in his doorway before the entire office staff, is as follows: I assure you. Without math, you’ll wind up being no more than a common prostitute. (Later you’ll find out this common prostitute line was repeated for most girls, while boys got common criminal.)
Or it’s later that same year. You’ve walked home from school with Wally Ray Gans every single day this week, hoping he’ll ask you to the Demolay hayride, which he mentions is this Friday. (Demolay is the boy’s branch of the Masons.) Wally Ray is a short girl’s John Cleary—blond and blue-eyed—only shy, the last one to raise his hand in class, even if he has the answers first. You decide he is, in Mother’s parlance, soulful. He says maybe he’ll call you about the hayride, and you’re convinced that you stand on the brink of your very first date.
The call comes while you’re lurking on the porch in hopes Wally Ray might amble by. So Lecia, who’s tethered within hovering distance of the phone by the expected calls of her own suitors, intercepts it, and quickly accepts for you in order to hustle the caller off the line. When you come in about six all sweaty and disconsolate, having given up hope of seeing Wally Ray, she says that your little boyfriend called, and he’ll be here at seven.
Yet once you swing open the knocked-on door at precisely two minutes till seven, you do not find the smiling, well ordered face of Wally Ray Gans. In one of fate’s crueler bait-and-switches, the porch frames none other than Mortimer G. Beauregard—a Mormon boy from Mississippi who grins so hard at the sight of you that you have to stop yourself from recoiling. Mortimer says your sister said you’d be ready and don’t you clean up nice.
Mortimer is renowned for his religious zeal and the shortness of his pegged pants when droopy bell bottoms are the fashion. His socks are white, his heavy shoes spit-shined. His shirt collar is starched so stiff that his pencil neck seems to snake around inside its vast circumference.
You are driven to the hayride by Mortimer’s brother, in a car with flattened cardboard boxes covering rust holes in the floor. But before you can step out of said car on Mortimer’s arm, there’s a stroke of luck, what you later think of as divine intervention: a thunderstorm blows in from the Gulf to blacken the sky and threaten tornadoes, thus canceling the hayride. Mortimer and his brother trot back from the lodge to the car where you’ve slouched low in the backseat and are clinging to the armrest. The brother says it’s called off, and Mortimer slides in next to you actually saying shucks then snapping his fingers.
You perk up immensely. On the road back to your house, you feel you’ve been unhooked from the taut line that would have reeled you into social oblivion with Mortimer. You chatter with a level of cheer that only seems to jack up his misery.
But your relief is countered by Mortimer’s disappointment. By the time you’ve hit the home driveway, he looks so disappointed, so blotchy skinned under the dome light of his brother’s Dodge Dart—with his hair wet-combed hard to one side like a sad little rooster—that you hear yourself inviting him in for a Coke.
Thus he becomes your first date. His pants end high on his white shins, and he leans forward, talking with the earnest ardor of a desperate vacuum-cleaner salesman. For most of the evening he is bartering for the lost state of your non-Mormon soul. (You don’t have the heart to tell him you’ve never been baptized and are, in effect, a nonChristian heathen, a wanna-be Buddhist.) He explains why, in his church, even heaven is segregated: because coloreds wouldn’t want to be in our heaven—this despite the fact that he claims it’s a higher heaven, by which he means cl
oser to God and Jesus.
By ten o’clock, whatever pity you felt for Mortimer has drained away to blunt loathing. He stands in your doorway, making his final pitch for you to come work at the Mormon peanut butter factory next weekend. Despite the fact that no one ever asks you anywhere, and you frequently tell your sister you’d go to a dogfight to get out of the house, you say no and no and no thank you to Mortimer, all the while longing for the door to swing forever shut on him. Your final handshake is quick enough to resemble (in memory if not fact) the drawing of a pistol.
On Monday you find a copy of The Joseph Smith Legacy atop your locker. Underneath it, there’s a carefully folded note that holds the following poem, typed and unsigned, either written for you or for some unnamed other:
I saw you on your horse today
your eyes like eggs your hair like hay.
When you enter speech class later, Mortimer’s foghorn voice shouts out—with the revved-up glee of a disc jockey—what a great time he had on your date. Of course the word date doesn’t repeat itself in the air in shimmering neon magnifying—date Date DATE—all the way to the green horizon. Of course the entire room doesn’t wheel in unison to gape at you frozen in the doorway. You can’t deny Mortimer’s claim, nor explain the trickery of it without drawing even more attention to the subject. But the dry-ice chill you emanate finally reaches him, and he shrinks back into silence like a leech on whom salt has been thrown.
Then it’s summer. Your mother’s taken her degree with honors and has just finished teaching art in a local junior high. Summer should bring her relief, time to knock off a few art history classes toward the Ph.D. she’s angling for. But she slides into it edgy. The phonograph endlessly seems to spin the dog-whipped blues of Big Brother and the Holding Company. While Lecia cleans the house for the brief entry and exit of her next suitor, whom Mother will invariably mock for his simplemindedness, the young Janis Joplin, who’s from nearby Port Arthur, rasps out:
I’m just like a turtle, baby,
Hiding underneath my horny shell.…
One weekend your daddy takes off on a fishing trip, and it’s that night Mother chooses to vanish again. No note rests on the plywood table. No single one of her teacher or college friends—at least among those whose phone numbers you can drum up—seems to have crossed her path. So the evening unfolds in a series of internal cliff faces you suddenly plunge over.
No matter how often she takes off like this, you never get used to it. One minute, you’re settling before the TV eating pears from a can and watching Laugh-In; in the next instant, the fact of her absence releases a blast of flame inside you, leaving the TV characters mouthing their lines without sound. You give up and turn off the set, sit in worry until Lecia comes home from her date.
She mocks your anxiety, but while both of you sit by the phone, cross-legged and reading, she chews her already gnawed-at cuticles down to the bloody quick. At midnight, you both set out in Daddy’s green truck on the asphalt roads that meander through the county, Lecia navigating past every gin mill or liquor store in dim hope of sighting your mother’s car.
Back home, the two of you sit out under the dripping chinaberry in webbed lounge chairs for the better part of the night. You’re waiting for the phone to ring or Mother’s car to rumble up. Because your mind has looped through the gamut of minor disasters that might befall your mother, and because all that’s left are tragedies that involve swirling police lights, you bicker.
The subject is whose misbehavior might have run Mother off this time. Lecia claims your sullen misery would, in her parlance, drive Jesus Christ to drink soapy water. You maintain that Lecia’s illiterate boyfriend worried Mother about her prospects as a grandmother—specifically whether such children might be born with fully opposable thumbs or not. You trade shots like this back and forth. Every now and then a car’s rushing proximity will silence you, then slide away, dragging that same silence behind it.
The next morning at dawn, Lecia snaps up the blaring phone mid-ring. Turns out Mother’s at the Holiday Inn with a hangover so severe she can’t drive, so can Lecia pick her up in the truck Daddy left behind and hell with it we’ll get the car later. Whether Mother specifically suggests that you be left behind or Lecia decides it, when the truck backs out, you suddenly feel like a kid looking up a treehouse rope as it gets drawn inside a plywood door.
Into this garage the truck eventually appears huffing. Lecia runs around to heave open the door on Mother’s side. It’s rusty enough to give a deep sea-monster sort of moan. Then Mother is spilling out of it, weak-legged as a colt, and Lecia is there to catch her.
Mother lies in bed weeping silently. Every now and then some wave inside her surges up, and she’ll escalate to hacking sobs. Meanwhile, Lecia bustles around with the crisp certainty of a field nurse. How does she know what remedies to dispense? A dish towel of ice for Mother’s forehead. A glass of tepid ginger ale for her stomach. A pillowcase warm from the dryer. Such gifts never occur to you. You watch Lecia minister till Mother finally sleeps, coiled on her side in that massive bed like a fossil you’d find hardened in a dry riverbed.
Lecia says only that the hotel room was a mess. Over the course of hours, she details that—Mother had thrown up down the hall and on the bathroom floor and along the side of the car. She’d lost her credit card somewhere, and Lecia had to pay for the room with her own money plus change she scrounged from the bottom of Mother’s purse and the floor of the car.
It’s dusk when Mother’s eyes open. Her hands tremble for a cigarette you help her light. She says the cigarette is lifesaving. She says yes to Lecia’s offer of chicken soup.
But before the can opener has hummed around the can’s circumference while you watch, Mother has bolted to the bathroom. Lecia tests the knob to find it locked. Only after a long string of silence does Mother answer. She claims to have your daddy’s Colt .45, with which she plans to kill herself.
And that’s the tableau you’re held in while the sun falls: Lecia in the hall, her spine stiff as a drill sergeant’s though her voice speaking to the closed door is reasonable and plaintive at once. She cajoles Mother while you stay shushed into silence. But you scribble notes to your sister—perhaps your first ever true action in the face of Mother’s locking herself away. Let’s call the law! Or Let’s go around the house and bust out the window! Lecia waves these away. Every now and then the conversation stalls. Then the stillness emanating from the locked door becomes massive. It can set the air in the linoleum hallway aripple.
By the time the moon has risen halfway up the sky, the injustice of the whole situation suddenly strikes you. Before you know it, you’re shouting down the hall at the locked door where Lecia stands as if to block your words—Go on and do it, goddamn it. I’m sick of waiting. Just shoot yourself then if you’ve got the guts—
Lecia tries to shush you and wave you back. Finally she shoves you down the hall, saying just go somewhere else if you can’t handle it. Once the cruelty of what you’ve shouted floods you with its countercurrent, you run to your room and fling your body down on the bed, pull the pillow over your humming head, and wait for the gunshot that doesn’t come and doesn’t come. Then you’re crying hard, not for your mother or Lecia or your poor daddy, who’s probably half-drunk and innocently frying bass under the stars with his pals. No you’re crying for yourself. This eventually plunges you into the stonelike sleep born of unrelieved self-pity.
Just before dawn, you hear a pinging, chipping noise—stone against stone, maybe, or metal against stone. It’s rhythmic, too slow to sound purposeful, but loud enough and near enough to wake you through the low, dinosaur-like drone of the air conditioner.
On the back porch, your bare feet are cold. Lecia sits on the top step with her back to you. She’s wearing somebody’s overgrown football jersey. She bends over so far her chin rests nearly on her knee.
You finally ask what’s this dogshit racket out here.
Just jick-jacking around, Lecia says. When y
ou lean over her shoulder, you can see she’s holding a ballpeen hammer, chopping the edges off the step bricks with it.
Daddy sees this, he’s gonna tear you a new asshole, you say. Lecia doesn’t even register this, just finds another sharp edge of brick to start shearing off. The air is still. The fog in the yard seems to muffle all sound, but for Lecia’s sharp chick (pause) chink chink. In the washhouse, the dryer is tumbling its racket. You tell her she’s gone stark staring nuts. He’s gonna know she did this. And what good’s it do, just piss him off is all, after Mother getting all drunkedy-ass?
I don’t give a shit what he thinks, Lecia says.
In the yard next door, somebody is heaving sacks of something heavy in Mr. Lawrence’s truck bed, powdered concrete maybe, or sand or lime. If it’s Aaron—the black carpenter—and if Daddy were here, they’d soon meet out back by the garbage cans to pass a pint bottle back and forth across chain link.
Lecia glances at you full face a minute. She must have rubbed her eyes in her sleep, for last night’s mascara makes dark rings around each one. She says, These people don’t have any sense, Mary. Hasn’t that dawned on you? Not the sense God gave a goat.
What are you talking about? you ask.
Already it’s hot. You watch the Siamese roll on the warm patio bricks.
Lecia turns back to you, borderline rankled. She says, It hasn’t even dawned on you yet, has it? In that instant, your colossal sister looks so small—her brown body bent in on itself that way—you almost believe you could gather her whole in your arms like a puppy. But she’s brushed you aside every way she knows.
You mean Mother and Daddy? you finally say. In the chinaberry tree, a bird whistles a two-syllable tune that sounds like a question, Bob White? Bob White?
Lecia says, Neither one of them has a lick of sense. Sooner you figure that out, the better off you’ll be. I don’t listen to shit from either one.
