Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

herself, he said, seeming impatient. You can call me if she starts making those noises. He scribbled out his home number on a card.

      Standing, I slung my purse over my shoulder, then I spat out a curse I hadn’t heard since seventh grade: You, Sparky, can take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Then I stalked out.

      Only looking back, after decades of shrinkdom, do I realize how radical to the point of bizarre his position was. He was either the genius Shirley Mink thought him to be, or a little wobbly sending me down into the lion’s den to confront Mother.

      (In case you haven’t read my early version of the passel of lies my family was built on—yours for a pittance—the broad outline of it needs going over. If you have read it, skip over this part.)

      After a conciliatory session with Tom Sawyer—who was blasé about the rolling-doughnut comment—I flew to Texas on cheap standby, in a cargo plane whose pilot wore a World War I flying cap with flaps like Snoopy wore.

      At my folks’ house, digging around in the attic, I routed out four wedding rings from a trunk. After days of my relentless nagging, plus a pitcher of margaritas, Mother owned up to having married a few times before Daddy, like maybe about four.

      She doesn’t date, she marries, her mother had said of her. Age eighteen—not even knocked up before she’d wed at seventeen—she’d given birth to my brother, Tex, followed a few years by his sister, Virginia. Mother’s engineer husband could afford a nice place in New York, where she pissed him off by taking classes at the Art Students League. Her bohemian streak didn’t suit him. His mother moved up to help with the kids, and one evening Mother came home to find the house cleared to its baseboards, the babies gone. It took her years to track them down in New Mexico, where they were happily in school and calling another woman Mommy. Single, broke, scared, Mother had—on the spot torn up the custody papers she’d brought along.

      Then came her marrying spree, as she looked for a husband who’d help her get those kids back. By the time she got to Daddy—who was willing to take them in—they were grown, Tex training for a stint in Southeast Asia.

      So my sister and I had reignited that preexisting loss. That was why Mother had gone nuts, not because I kept asking her to make grilled cheese or give me fifteen cents for the Weekly Reader. An old spark had already been burning down the fuse toward her explosion.

      After her breakdown, we’d bobbed on unsteadily till I was in grade school, when she inherited a bundle of cotton and banking money from her supposedly middle-class mother, and she divorced Daddy, this time bringing Lecia and me to Colorado. She’d married a Mexican bartender, husband six, buying a bar to boot. Less than a year into that, having spent what may have been a million bucks, Mother had gone back to Daddy, who became the only husband to sign up twice—husband five and seven.

      During a handful of stable years, she’d reenrolled in school and wound up teaching art in junior high. But her lost kids never stopped haunting her, she said. Her own mother—my now-dead grandmother—had blamed her.

      Once the secret had poured out—the rough patches were gone over—Mother got to wondering about those children. So Lecia hired a Pinkerton detective to track down Tex and Virginia.

      My half sister turned out to be a blowsy L.A. blonde with such a taste for pills that I’d bust her eating Daddy’s back-pain meds straight from his bedside drawer. I bought her a bus ticket back to San Diego then, and I never saw her again, though she and Mother talked sometimes by phone.

      But I took to my easygoing brother, Tex, right off. He was slim and wiry with hair dark as mine. Finding Mother explained to him the artist streak his engineer father had shipped him off to military school to get rid of. After the service, Tex had gone on a tear with drugs and alcohol, but he’d been in active recovery some decades. It tantalized me to think his sobriety might spill over onto Mother, especially when he decided to relocate his photography business to Texas.

      Daddy greeted Tex like a lost army buddy, but he’d grown tired of the story long ago, so—after a few hours sitting around the living room catching up—Daddy drifted off to watch some game.

      In movie versions of traumatic secrets, the family walks arm in arm into a field of poppies while the sun paints them gold, which scenario I had faith in. With Tex there, a lot of infection drained off pretty fast. Into the night, Mother sat in the rocking chair in her studio, poking at the wood fire, reviewing the tale for some shifting configuration of Lecia and Tex and me. With each version, a new detail emerged—the snow in her hair as she came into the cleared house; the photo of Tex in a sailor suit she’d hoarded; how thick the custody papers were as she tore them—her hands were sore for days.

      For decades we’d watched her portraits start with fluid ocher streaks, marveling as each layer of paint drew from the violent slashes a particular shrimp boat, say, down to its last bolt. So for a week or so, with every retelling, Mother herself got more real. Before I left after ten days or so, she’d moved way closer to the front of her face.

      Back in the Midwest, I bounced into Tom Sawyer’s office like somebody who’d thrown down her crutches to start tap-dancing. He’d been so right. It wasn’t my fault, Mother’s madness. Cured, I declared myself.

      Not long after, the low-residency grad school in Vermont I hadn’t believed existed took me on probation, no doubt due to puffed-up references from Walt and Etheridge. I kept living in Minneapolis, teaching there. But twice per year I went to Vermont for a few weeks—poetry camp, I called it.

      Age twenty-three, I walked into a decrepit mansion on a campus approaching bankruptcy. (The college would officially fold the year I graduated.) The chintz sofas were faded. The French-pleat drapes were missing a few hooks. The white wine came from a gallon jug and left the taste of pennies in your mouth.

      To get there, I’d drawn from a grubstake I’d cobbled together trucking crawfish from Louisiana for my sister’s newly acquired farmer husband—the Rice Baron, I called him.

      Back then nobody had heard of the teachers whose red ink so bloodied the poems and essays I turned in. Bob still worked construction in the summer to feed his four kids. My thesis advisor, Louise, baked ornate pastries at home, then sold them in local shops or restaurants. Heather had one slender volume and was better known for her wicked pool moves. Frank played jazz piano in a Boston bar on weekends. Ray had almost won a big prize for the dog-eared paperback of stories I’d been hauling around, but he still crashed in a sleeping bag on my floor when he was in Minneapolis. Two brothers, Toby and Geoffrey, hadn’t published their memoirs yet. A poet named Ellen Byant Voigt had gathered up this crew about five years before they started dragging Pulitzers and presidential awards and genius grants in their wake.

      Easily the least prepared person to study with this august—if not yet anointed—company, I drank like a fish during residencies. Classes ran all day. Parties went till dawn, and I got to hear storytellers of the first order practice their craft. Ray described how the bankruptcy lawyer he’d stiffed of a fee had taken him to small claims court to try to get custody of Ray’s dog. The outraged judge had said, You’re gonna take this man’s dog?

      Back in Minneapolis, the only way to shovel through the heaps of work was to stay sober, which meant living like a nun. Going nowhere booze was served, I slid as if on a greased track between apartment and library and whatever teaching I could scrape up. No more bartending—the temptation to drink would’ve kept me blotto—no more pogoing to punk bands. The one art opening I slipped into for a glance around turned into a three-day binge.

      After a few years’ work, I’d reached the final meeting with my thesis supervisor—the Resident Genius, I called her—in a chic French restaurant I’d saved up to take her to. She was an elegant woman with a ballerina’s slim poise and the ability to run a demitasse spoon around a china cup without looking callow. I felt like a charwoman but tried to play it off as if we were equals, telling her all I needed was the right publisher. (How did I dare? I now think.)

      I swear, I said, it’s like the magazines installed a machine at my post office that recognizes my address, yanks the poems out, then stuffs them in the return envelope.