Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

      But checking my P.O. in the student union the next day, brushed past by the sons and daughters of the professional class—my down-jacketed (alleged) peers—I sensed a dashed line around me where invisible scissors would soon clip me away. Fair-minded, straight-toothed, impossibly clear-skinned, these kids were nothing if not democratically inclined vis-à-vis the likes of me. They blew pot smoke from their joints into my pursed lips and paid my way to Dylan and the Grateful Dead. They gave me rides in paid-for cars. Their parents steered me under restaurant awnings and through doors where the maître d’s looked at my soaking tennis shoes long and hard. They passed menus featuring appetizers that cost more than the whole chicken-fried steak dinners Daddy bought us on paycheck night. They invited me home for Thanksgiving and Easter. They seemed to trust my scrappy climb out of the lower class would allow me to handle on first sight all manner of eating utensil by imitating, chimpanzeelike, their movements.

      Their bottomless cool—their cynical postures grown from privilege they were ungrateful for—could make me hate them. Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and think they hit a home run.

      But by God, I could outdrink the little suckers, and when the dashed lines around my body felt sharp enough to be visible, I might take up a held-out bottle.

      Faced with a boy I had a crush on—a bow-legged Missouri cowboy with the face and form of young Marlon Brando—I eagerly took the tequila his friend handed me. Forgoing lime and salt, I tucked my hair behind my ears and tossed back a shot. As that one went down like bleach, I was holding up my glass for another.

      Whoa, Brando said, looks like you’ve done this before.

      Absolutely, I said.

      She’s from Texas, a kid from my physics class said.

      Texas girl? Brando said over his shoulder, before turning back to the two girls who’d presented themselves to him like dinner mints. I threw back another shot, which scalded a little channel through me. The boys cheered. By the third shot, the tequila seemed less poisonous. By the fourth, I felt a cool blue moon rising in my chest.

      Though I’d vowed not to drink that week (I had an anthro paper to finish), I’d spied Brando doing shots with his pals and wedged into the group. He cut me a smile before squatting down to unlatch his guitar case, and as he started to strap on the instrument, I saw in the case’s blue velvet bottom a weathered copy of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, which felt like a further sign that we were carved from the same wood. That novel was one I innately knew to be unreservedly great, and whose first paragraph somebody started slurrily to recite:

      Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

      Next thing I knew, I was earping onto the frozen earth, then girls were steering me loop-legged to my door. Which was the end of that night and more than a few others.

      Come Christmas, I caught a ride to Dallas, then took the silver bullet-shaped bus into the Leechfield station, where Daddy stood in creased khakis with comb marks in his black hair. The neck I threw my arms around had gone loose and leathery. For the first time, he smelled old. He took my duffel bag, saying, You could use a few pounds.

      Passing through the greenish neon of the station, I felt time curve back, and us in it. The place seemed coated with chicken grease. Even the pinball glass was smoky. A man sat on his shoeshine box listening to a big transistor radio with a coat-hanger antenna. In his raised-up chair was a thin lady with conked hair slicked alongside her head.

      Outside, Daddy threw my duffel into the truck bed. The door he opened groaned with rust, the hollow timbre of it tolling my arrival better than church bells. For five months, I’d ached to reenter a familiar slot alongside my fading daddy, but being there my mind went skittery as water flicked on a skillet. Even with the window open, the truck was redolent with Camel smoke and the goop Daddy used to clean oil off his hands with. There was a hint of cumin from a paper bag of corn-husk tamales from a roadside stand. And running under it all like current—what got him up in the morning and laid him out at night was the oak smell of wood barrels where whiskey soaked up flavor.

      For the first time in front of me, he drew a pint bottle from under his seat. He put the upended lid in the ashtray, and before he handed the bottle over, he drew out a corner of his shirttail to wipe the top with, saying, Want a swig?

      As a kid sitting on the bar, I’d sipped beer through the salted triangle of his aluminum can, but Daddy had so long and adamantly denied drinking every day that Mother had long since stopped asking. And he’d sure as hell never handed me any hard liquor.

      Daddy’s wink echoed our old conspiracy: me and him against Mother and Lecia, whose tightly guarded collusions were traded in whispers and giggles that he and I were meant to stay deaf to.

      The bottle gleamed in the air between us. I took the whiskey, planning a courtesy sip. But the aroma stopped me just as my tongue touched the glass mouth. The warm silk flowered in my mouth and down my gullet, after which a little blue flame of pleasure roared back up my spine. A poof of sequins went sparkling through my middle.

      As he went to screw the lid back on, my hand swung out of its own accord, and I said, Can I have another taste?

      That taste started me seeking out more hard liquor once I was back at school, though drugs were still easier to come by even than beer. I did okay at old Lackluster College—in no way a star, but neither the abject flop I’d figured on. Daddy carried my grade reports in his ancient wallet.

      But it’s a truism, I think, that drunks like to run off. Every reality, no matter how pressing—save maybe death row—has an escape route or rabbit hole. Some drinkers go inward into a sullen spiral, and my daddy was one of these; others favor the geographic cure. My mother taught me to seek external agents of transformation—pick a new town or man or job.

      That’s why I left college at the end of my sophomore year: I just got this urge to run off, maybe because friends in a band were heading for Austin. Or all the rich kids were going abroad. Or maybe the course work was getting too hard, and I couldn’t face losing my scholarships and reentering the hairnet. I floundered and skipped classes that winter till, shortly before finals that spring, I just stopped showing up.

      Over a hotfudge malted with Walt at the corner drugstore one afternoon, I tried to make my slapdash bailout sound like a literary escapade prompted by a lack of funds. I’d get some writing done while working to save up. Then I’ll come back, I told him—though I intended no such thing.

      Shirley and I have been talking about that, Walt said, his long spoon scraping the muddy fudge from the glass bottom.

      And you’ve decided to donate a million bucks to me, right?

      If we adopted you, he said, the college would have to let you go to school as a faculty child gratis.

      I lowered my spoon. Stunned, I was, and touched. They’d never fall for that, I said.

      I think they’d have to, Walt said, signaling for a check. Shirley talked to a lawyer friend of ours.

      Lifelong, I’d been trying to weasel into another tribe. Back in my neighborhood, I was shameless about showing up on people’s porches come supper, then sprawling around their dens till they kicked me out. Wrapped in a crocheted blanket on a hook rug with the game on and the family cheering around me—digging my grubby hand into their popcorn bowl—I could convince myself I was one of them. A few times it almost surprised me when I heard the inevitable sentence: Time to go home, Mary Marlene.

      Fishing for his wallet, Walt explained how easy it’d be. He and Shirley had talked it over, and even the kids were all for it. His youngest boy had asked whose room I’d sleep in.

      Would I have to change my name? I said. Somehow that would seal my betrayal.

      I don’t think so, he said. Or you can petition to change it back.

      The sun was warm on us through the plate glass, and I stared at the door, wishing with all my might