Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

those little fellers back. I sure wish you were here to yank a few out of the water with me. I miss you more than black eyed peas, more than oysters. Your baby, Mary

      Without Daddy, the wide plain of Minnesota was a vast and empty canvas, me a flealike pin dot scurrying across.

      So I sought the favor of my all male professors, becoming the kind of puppyish suckup I’d hated in high school. Getting to class early, I shot my hand in the air.

      The white-haired psychology prof, Walt Mink, was a tall, barrel-chested man whose foreshortened leg, damaged from a drunk driver’s head-on, gave him a slightly heaving walk he never slowed down for. No doubt, a knack for tending the troubled—including the occasional too-many-mushrooms psychosis—kept him moving at that clip. Specializing in brain physiology, he kept labs full of pigeons and rats to teach conditioning theory in intro psych. In a sleep lab he sometimes ran, he wired kids up to a high-tech EEG.

      I’d signed up for his freshman seminar, Paradigms of Consciousness, under the delusion that consciousness was code for drugs—the sole subject in which I had a leg up. Early on, he spotted me pulling bobby socks on my hands after class. Having lost the leather mittens Daddy had bought me at GI surplus—stiff leather with Korean script on the inside tag—I’d taken to wearing footwear.

      He said, This another fashion trend I’ve let slide by?

      Chronic mitten loser, I told him.

      My department collects strays, he said. Stop by my office tonight. We’ll see what we can find.

      But during the day, the prospect slid back and forth in my skull like a BB. Why did he want to see me at night?

      Leaving my library job, I faced sparse snow on the ground, scraped at by winds like straight razors. It was cold, you betcha. So I loped over to the science building, where the gleaming labs with black counters and curvy gas jets creeped me out.

      There was a warm amber light spilling from Walt’s doorway. I craned around the door, and he waved me through. In a green towel on his lap, he held a white lab rat, stretched on her side, taking sips of air while her fidgeting, thimble-sized offspring—pink as young rosebuds—were nursing. She’d given birth earlier, he said, and seemed to have some kind of infection. Can you hold her so I can maneuver this eyedropper? he said.

      I sat down in a side chair, and he eased the wriggling small weightlessness onto my lap.

      It was puzzling to me, his tenderness for that rat, since where I grew up, rats were target practice—nutria rats big as terriers with their bright orange enamel fangs. You went to the dump with a .22 or a pistol to pick them off. Doonie had given me a nutria rat skull one Valentine’s Day.

      She just had a rough time delivering today, Walt said. I was at home and kept thinking about her. Wondering how the babies were doing. …

      He fixed the eyedropper between her teeth and eased out a half drop, dabbing off her whiskers with a tissue. Then he idly ran his thumb along her muzzle.

      Watching that, I couldn’t live another instant without unloading into his care my whirling insides. My every woe came spilling out. No money to go home. No place to stay over Thanksgiving. A boy I liked, then didn’t, then did. Plus the four jobs I held down were eating me alive. Walt handed me one pink flounce of tissue after another.

      Worst of all, the only reason I’d come there was to write, but I’d refused to sign up for a lit class, being too ill read not to shame myself. At a freshman mixer early on, I heard kids hurling around like fastballs opinions about Russian novels it had taken me a week to figure out the characters in—I had to make a chart in back. They were talking Dostoyevsky’s blah-blah and the objective correlative of the doodad. They’d studied in Paris and Switzerland. The closest I’d come to speaking French was ordering boudain sausage from the take-out window of Boudreaux’s Fat Boy.

      What small whiz-kid luster I’d given off in grade school had gone to mist starting my sunglassed junior year. I knew some Shakespeare plays, and I’d read a couple great books till their spines split. But I’d never had to form an opinion about any of that. I’d just blink at it like a bass.

      Instead, I’d signed up for classes related to linguistic philosophy, for which I had even less talent. In Walt’s own seminar, we were reading neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer—a brick I broke my brain on.

      Walt would help me with all that, he said, adding, Come in to talk if you’re feeling bad.

      From bawling so hard, my eyes were squinty as a boxer’s, and my salty face felt drawn up as by too-tight pigtails. But the deep calm Walt gave off had stilled me inside. I stared down at the mice, each small enough to fit into a sugar spoon.

      Finally, I said, I thought you were here to put stuff in our heads.

      Unless we deal with what’s already in there, he said, I can’t accomplish that.

      In the hallway, Walt reached into a cardboard box of lost clothes and fished around till he raised up a pair of gray suede gloves. Sliding my hand in one, I felt the silky warmth of rabbit fur. I’d have felt too greedy taking them myself, but he nudged me on.

      I was in the hall when he called me back to him, saying, One more thing …

      I stopped. The unheated hall was shadowy, and watching him heave toward me, I felt a sick fear bubble up. If he makes a pass at me, I thought, I’ll run.

      He said, Mind if I ask you something personal?

      I stared past him into the lab behind him, where silver faucets—curved like swans’ necks—glinted in the dim light. His blue-eyed face was dominated by a hawk’s-beak nose. He said, Are you sleeping okay? Gained or lost any weight?

      Actually, I’d used a food service knife to poke an extra hole in my belt already, and for weeks on end, no matter how tired, I’d wake at three or four in the morning, sometimes hollering at some shadowy figure over me.

      He pulled a pen from his pocket and limped over to the wall to write down a phone number on a card, saying his wife ran a neighborhood clinic if I’d like to try some therapy.

      No way could I afford anything like that.

      Oh, I’m pretty sure she could work something out, he said. She’s good that way. And you should come over to the house to meet her and the kids. My daughter writes poetry, and you might be able to help her with it. We’d pay you of course. …

      Walt helped me figure out that if I dropped the murderous physics, my grades might score scholarship money, maybe soon as second term. He’d hire me to clean rat and pigeon cages, which would free me from the food service’s vile hairnet.

      (As he had for who knows how many others, Walt had decided to lift me up. The therapy—when I showed up—involved sitting in a cozy office, trying to look sane enough not to be kicked out. But every now and then I’d blubber about being lonesome for home or scared to fail, and I mostly left breathing deeper.)

      Buoyed up after talking to Walt, I set out for my dorm. The cold had polished and clarified the sky into onyx. The stars seemed close enough to scoop up. Crossing the quad, I felt some wormhole into my skull finally get bored. There was an internal click as an actual idea of Cassirer’s broke through. The sentence that had so addled me suddenly made sense (in the paperback of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms I still own, the phrase has rockets and fireworks scribbled alongside it):

      The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language.

      He meant that words shaped our realities, our perceptions, giving them an authority God had for other generations. The indecipherable sentence had been circumnavigating my insides like a bluebottle fly for a week, and at last I got hold of it: words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion—not drugs, not boys. That’s why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards.

      I moved through the lung-scalding air, no longer a misplaced cracker but a by-God symbolic