by Mary Karr
You are so far from being able to metabolize this dosage of freakishness that you take inventory like a stock clerk. Let’s see. You are boarded and barred in with a lunatic disguised as a friendly sailor, a whore whose flesh is rotting off her face, an inflated barman whose interest in you has a carnivorous edge. Augustus has digressed into a shocking state. But his fluttery panic has begun to seem less scary than Miss Ann’s glib smile, which is what—after all—got you through Effie’s door in the first place.
Augustus goes back to pressing soppy napkins to his stung-looking eyes, and with Ann grinning like she’s won a raffle (maybe she is high after all), Robert Cook reintroduces himself all around.
The nature of your thoughts then undergoes a massive shift—an upheaval so profound as to seem volcanic. Psychically speaking, sub-continental rivers move. Your whole cosmological fundament is reshaped. Time ceases to follow normal rules of progression. Instead it blinks on and off like a strobe light. Moments actually vanish while you occupy them, as if some switch on your cranium is suddenly flipped to pause, then mysteriously restarted.
During these gaps, you are picked up like a dollhouse figurine and lowered into different places on the game board that is Effie’s. So one instant you feel yourself spiraling into darkness; the next, light streams down on a whole new stage set, with characters whose faces display the comfort of having been at your table a while.
In the first of these, you snap to beside a gray-headed black man who wears green suspenders and a derby hat like a honky-tonk pianist. Robert Cook’s on his other side talking into the man’s ear, which is cupped to better take in Cook’s jack-hammered repetitions. The man’s brow under his hat brim strikes a deep furrow. Augustus and Ann are absent from their chairs. (Where are they? gone how long?) A tower of shot glasses a foot high sits at the table center, and the coppery taste in your mouth doesn’t reveal whether you imbibed any of those shots, or who paid for them, or if you’re owing.
There are people in the bar and at tables around you. The stage is occupied not by the Wookie dancer, but by an athletic woman maybe five feet tall in flowery blue bikini panties and matching bra. She’s muscled up like a gymnast with a mismatched wig of coarse streaming hair you can see the plug-holes of, like doll hair. She possesses the hypnotizing ability to shimmy every inch of her body at once, as if the skin were some casing she could detach from and vibrate independent of muscle.
Robert Cook continues to meet and greet phantoms approaching your table while the old man says to you, What wrong with him?
You say, I don’t know. Honestly. He didn’t come with us.
He says, I never seen nothing like it. Say the same thang over and over like a record with a scratch.
I know, you say. He seems pretty messed up. Maybe he’s on something.
He got a screw loose. Done drop the cheese off his cracker.
Can’t imagine what made him like that.
The old man rears his head back, says, What you call me?
You say, I didn’t call you anything. I just said, we don’t know him.
He draws back further still, affronted, puts both hands on his shirt front. Beside him Robert Cook’s trapped voice rises and falls in cadence. The derby man says, You don’t like black folks do you?
This question has no correct answer, but your mind still scuttles in search of one. If you check the box that says, Sure I do, I like black folks fine—then you’re denying both his perception and the white world’s innate racism. And if you say, Much as anybody—then you’re being glib about slavery’s legacy. And if you say, Not this red hot second, you’re essentially robing yourself in a sheet with white pointy hood from which eyeholes are scissored. What you say instead is: Where are my friends?
He says, They long gone.
Which causes the room to list slightly, like it’s some bottle filled with heavy fluid at a tilt. If you were tramped down by internal uncertainties before, now you are paralyzed, welded in place.
The old man rises and levels his hat brim with great dignity, smoothes his shirtfront so even Robert Cook stops his parrotlike prattling and gazes up the height of him. The old man says, in an oracular tone, You be gone too directly.
This enigmatic goodbye sets your internal continents adrift again.
You click back to life at the same table in the midst of a tune played by a white band that must include Ann’s brother: “Before you accuse me/Take a look at yourself.” The presence of these guys starts your foot tapping. Your head slides back and forth on its gliding track. Augustus and Ann sit across from you. But they’ve been transformed. Ann’s radiance has dimmed considerably, a lantern in which the wick has been turned too low. Her small smile seems tight. Augustus is pale as salt. He gnaws his right thumbnail with such vigor you half expect him to start spitting out small chunks of flesh. It’s all you can do to crank out a single sentence. You say, Where were you guys?
But the black-coned speakers blare, and the blue sparkly drums go thumpata-thumpata-thumpata—a pulse with a trill in it. For a long time, the melody spirals in and out of tone and measure, as if the band is being rushed backward and forward fast enough to deform the sound. Finally, Ann says, by way of explanation, Just don’t use the bathroom. When you ask why, she shakes her head.
The room blinks dark again, and you come to on the other side of the table facing the old man in the derby. He sits between two large-breasted women who seem to take turns hollering vehemently at him. He seems literally to be holding onto his hat with both hands as if the wind of their shouts could set it tumbling out some nonexistent window.
The women wear what can only be called church dresses—one royal purple with a great white pilgrim collar; the other tomato red with even rows of yellow flowers. But it’s their giant sun hats that transfix you. Each is the size of a small end table and might well serve in some city apartment as a patio garden or window-box ecosystem. The purple one features lavender morning glory blooms sipped at by hummingbirds floating in place from green wires. The red hat has what appears to be the fluffy tails of rabbits rooting under the thickets of twisted foliage. Each lady takes her turn volubly berating the old man, and he bears the weight of this like somebody who has it coming.
You’re absorbing all this, trying to figure out who the women are to fall so fiercely on this man (his sisters? wife and girlfriend? disappointed business partners?), when with virtually no warning, the tomato-red lady draws up a patent leather bag from the floor and whaps the guy.
All your life, you’ve heard the phrase—whapped upside the head—but this is the first time you’ve seen it executed. It’s a variation on what was once called a pimp slap, for it punishes without marring the face or body. With a weighted object (the purse) and her considerable body mass behind the blow, she connected flatly against his temple with a cartoon whump. The man’s head flies to the other side like a ball batted from a tee. He’s thrown leaning into the large purple bosom on the opposing side, his derby now orbited by cartoon stars but still firmly clamped down with two hands.
The purple lady lets fly on the other temple, smashing two fingers. The man puts these in his mouth as if to whistle up a pack of dogs. The ladies are instantly watching the band again like nothing odd transpired.
Then you’re pitched again into blankness, an interval scored through by some demonic pencil lead. Minutes or hours elapse.
You snap awake and into a state of bladder-brimming urgency, like a kid sitting up befogged from dream just an instant before she wets the bed. Your bladder must be the size of a basketball. Don’t go to the bathroom, they said. No if ands or buts. Not a qualifier. Just don’t go. Like Don’t go in the attic, in a horror movie, or Don’t move or I’ll shoot.
You think, Between the dilemma and the deep blue devil. Between pissing my pants sitting here and braving the outback of the bathroom with neither pistol nor machete.
On the dance floor, unhooked pelvises work so butts pivot around their axes. In one corner, Miss Ann and Augu
stus even execute their stilted moves. You ponder this while admiring the crowd. You think, These are my people. You think, My country ’tis of thee.
Behind you, the purple lady is still verbally chewing out the old man. One of his eyes has sprouted what boxers call a mouse—a plum-sized bulge, pornographically blue. The tomato-red lady’s drink marks the place she once sat—a martini glass filled with amorphous pink fizz.
Which can only mean one thing: The tomato-red lady has gone to the bathroom. And since she wore a church dress, she must be Baptist (aren’t most black folks Baptist?), and wouldn’t she intervene if somebody wanted to sidle up and ask what your cracker-white ass was doing here on a Saturday night. You feel the whole room brighten as if some distant sun has risen. You can picture the bathroom now, maybe a little run down, but hey. The tomato-red lady will lend it the requisite dignity.
The instant you stand a warm hand lands lightly on your low back. Its fingers spread like spilled syrup, settling in the curve just above your ass—familiar but not out-and-out vulgar. Rotating, you find the monumental Effie bowing slightly and gesturing to the dance floor, arm crossed where a waist should be. It’s an attitude almost gallant. So while you’d rather chew linoleum than dance with Effie—not to mention the fact your bladder is aslosh—a refusal would open the door to interpretation. Maybe it would be another nick in the racist tally sheet the old man in the derby started by claiming you didn’t like black people. You look at Effie and think—in the clichés that have begun to string the loose rolling instants together—We shall overcome. You think, Give peace a chance.
That’s how you allow yourself to be drawn (as so many girls do and will and shouldn’t) into a set of arms you’d prefer to stay out of. The luxurious heat that enfolds you instantly suffocates. Effie is damp and smells like a sour beer rag. Plus Effie delivers the night’s largest and least predictable surprise, a massive gotcha.
It turns out Effie has breasts.
You’re not talking about the flabs men sometimes get from too many servings of pork chop and cream gravy. These are homegrown, Effie-generated boobs, each easily the size of your head. Which means that hand the size of a waffle iron on your lower back belongs to a female.
This betrayal tears a final rent in the already shredded fabric of the evening, for it casts doubt on the identity of every extant human. The room is instantly set whirling slowly around the pegged center of your discovery. You try to box out your feet as if under a basketball hoop—an attempt to gain foundation in the midst of the slow spinning.
In one orbit, you again glance at the derby man’s table and see the tomato-red lady—is she a lady?—is still absent. And the lure to the bathroom is now undeniably powerful, for even if Tomato Red happens to be a man, there’s still the fact of that Baptist church-dress to which you continue to attach some moral stamina. Plus she’s still in the ladies’ room, even now, waiting to act as your sponsor. The room reserved solely for ladies.
You say, I gotta use the bathroom.
Effie says whisper whisper whisper, Baby-doll. There’s no spiked insistence in her tone, but she draws you closer, actually wedges your narrow body in the deep fissure between her Macy’s-balloon tits. You manage to shove back hard and make excuses not unlike those Cinderella must have gabbled forth near the stroke of midnight.
Then in a wisp of time, you’re shoving through the bathroom door convinced you’ll find Tomato Red in a lush feminine lean over the sink, her net veil raised so she can apply her Billie Holiday lipstick.
The door creaks on its rusty spring, and you find the bathroom as expected. There’s the predictable faucetless sink—maybe a little grubbier than you’d planned for. In fact, it seems urine-streaked. Over it, the Wookie lady leans into a rust-freckled mirror. She says, I’m doing something here.
Both her hands are working on the far side of her head—maybe pinning her hair back or putting in an ear stud—some fairly delicate operation. Normally you’d turn back, but you’ve already undone your top button, thus announcing to your bladder that relief’s at hand. Your bladder will have nothing less, so you shove past her toward the doorless stall, which holds only a bucket of the type you once fed pigs from. With each of your few steps, your rubber soles crunch down on what feels like kids’ chalk or crayons underfoot, and you wonder what idiot would bring a child in here just as you manage to squat hovering above the bucket for blessed, if somewhat fiery, release.
That’s when you see what the Wookie is up to. She’s not adorning herself or ministering to her abscessed eye, which is indeed scabby and running with pus. She’s holding a syringe at a delicate tilt, injecting its contents into the vein along her neck. You stepped not onto crayons or chalk pastels, but onto vials and glassine envelopes. Maybe a dozen glitter up from the concrete floor like so many spent shell casings.
While you hang stranded in midair, held hostage by your own pissing, you hear her body weight slump down as if she’s been thrown. She’s mumbling a kind of chant, so you know she’s alive, not that you’d check her pulse if she lay still. Your only hope is for yourself—that she not touch you, and that no urinal spatters will send eager little spirochetes or venereal what-all splashing up to unfairly infect your skinny ass.
Outside the stall, you find the woman curled up, one arm instinctively covering the ruined eye. The syringe hangs from her neck like a miniature spear. She’s still saying something incoherent, over and over in mournful cadence.
You don’t run. Nor do you ask yourself why you’re lingering if you’ve no intention of helping. (I was there to watch.…)
In that breach, she transforms into a child you’ve been hired to pull a quilt up over or fetch a glass of water for. She’s in that fetal posture assumed by the dying. The long incline of her back shows rear rib bones rippling down ever smaller to the soft hill of hip. How elegantly made she is, you think, we all are.
Then an unbidden image surfaces, an illustration from your old zip-around white Bible—Jesus’s back bent over into the exact same curve, the cut flesh awaiting another lash.
When she rolls over suddenly, you startle and dash out. But in that instant of her turning, you made out what she’d been saying over and over, that litany of disappointed longing: Effie say I can sang. Effie say I can sang…
You fly across the maze of tables and bodies with Ann and Augustus in tow to find the steel bunker wall that once sealed you in has again melted, so the door to the outer world has reassembled, its knob in place. It’s there the old man with the battered derby calls out with a raised finger, Hold up a minute. He’s followed by the ever fresh Robert Cook, still stalled in that endless train of introduction.
The old man says, He fixing to drive me nuts. Y’all need to take him on outa here.
We don’t know where he lives, you say. He didn’t come with us.
This fact finally draws the man’s face into a pucker under his hat brim. He says, He ain’t y’all’s?
No sir. We never saw him before in our lives.
Well, whatever wrong with him?
Augustus Maurice says with no small parcel of pique, Do I look like a medical professional? It’s not some white people’s disease we can diagnose! Then he huffs outside with Ann.
The derby man touches your arm one last time, says in a voice far too mournful for you to bear just then, Please don’t call the po-lice on us. We ain’t bothering nobody.
No sir, you say. We got no intention of calling anybody. We just want to go home.
He pats your back as you leave, saying, Thank you, darling, thank you. Y’all have a good evening.
In the yellow station wagon, you find the highway unfurling of its own accord under headlights. Augustus and Ann sit in the backseat. She’s again become a fairy godmother, smiling so sweetly you see her draped in lavender organza and rosy veils. He tilts his head against her breast, but his eyes behind his wire rims are wide-staring.
He says, I’m fried.
You say, Crispy critters.
Then silence floods the car, for on nights like this the greatest truths can’t be uttered. Certainly not right off, maybe never.
Chapter Twenty-Four
AT HOME, ALONE IN YOUR ROOM, you will scribble several notebooks with hieroglyphic nonsense in hopes of finding that single unutterable truth. You know it’s there somewhere, skating just outside your field of vision. About four A.M., you wander naked and somewhat deranged by thirst into the kitchen, where the season’s first cut watermelon is covered in plastic wrap. You hoist it to the floor and squat above it like the savage you’ve fantasized you are. It’s not quite ripe yet, but you scoop the stiff fruit out with both hands, shove globs of it into your mouth so it spills down your arms and breasts and on your thighs while the Siamese sniffs and tentatively laps at the edge of the rind. The mantra chugging through your head chants, Effie say I can sang, Effie say I can sang…
At some point your mother will appear in the doorway—a colossus in flannel pajamas. She says quite foggily, What’re you doing, Mary? The question will reverberate for a million miles, colliding off planets, zipping by satellites while your mind gins up the four thousand possible answers. You’ll eventually find the wherewithal to say, Eating watermelon.
At that, she looks glancingly satisfied, says only, in gratuitous admonishment, Be sure and clean up that mess before you go to bed.
At dawn in an instant of psychic stillness that can only come to a badly scrambled mind, the single true sentence finally comes to you bristling with sparks. The sentence is stolen, but that doesn’t diminish the force of your pounce upon it, or the cometlike brilliance with which it streaks through you.
You write it in six-inch letters on a poster board you thumbtack to the wall, as if it’s a formula on par with relativity theory. Then you slip into shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops.
