Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

me on a friend’s recommendation—despite my being too muttonheaded to sport a very relevant diploma—will fail to renew me next semester. I’ve published one slim volume of verse and some essays, but so has every other semiliterate writer in Cambridge. It’s like owning a herd of cattle in my home state of Texas, publishing a book is.

      Problem three: Our landlords, the Loud Family. This time, they’re after Dev’s blue blow-up wading pool. They left a message: If there’s a yellow circle in the lawn, our security deposit must cover the cost of sodding. Sod off, I said to the answering machine, shooting it the finger, both barrels, underhanded, like pistolas from a holster. Double-dog damn them. Mr. Loud plans to spend all spring and summer painting the house. All today he stood on a ladder scraping—meticulously by hand—lead paint. Meanwhile, his old-time transistor blares the so-called easy-listening channel—zippity doo-dah for nine hours—and he’s only cleared a four-foot square, and I have to tape shut Dev’s room so no lead gets in. Mr. Loud’s bringing a boom box tomorrow, and all his Peter, Paul & Mary tapes. Do I remember Puff the Magic Dragon, he wants to know. Do I? On my fun scale, it ranks with the Nuremberg Trials. Virtually every hour, Mr. Loud trudges loudly in to pee—age maybe seventy, one plaid thermos, yet the guy pees like Niagara Falls. By dusk, he’s washing his brushes in my sink, while in my mind, I’m notching an arrow in my bow and aiming it at his ass.

      Problem four—minor but ongoing: I’m just a smidge further in the bag tonight than I’d planned on, which keeps happening. The yard hasn’t started to spin like a roulette wheel yet. I’m upright, but even the slightest list can set it off. Posture’s what I need, balance, like walking with a book on my head, which I always sucked at. Unless I keep that bubble exactly in the middle, the whirlies will start. Tip my head even one inch to the left, the oak tree pitches right. Unless I focus extra-hard at something close, I’ll tumble off the face of the planet, trailing puke as I fly. What helps is staring at the index finger. Just foreground it and let the rest fuzz up. I sit upright against the kitchen door, staring at my own finger like it’s the Delphic oracle.

      And there I sit, poised as if on a flagpole, feeling with my free hand for my drink, when the wisp of an idea trails through my head. It doesn’t last, but it’s audible: you’re the bad mom in the afterschool special, the example other moms—little parentheses drawn down around their glossy mouths—go to the principal about.

      Oh, horseshit, I think. Mother fell down and pissed her pants, Daddy got in fistfights and drank himself to death. (Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?) I turned out half okay; well, a quarter—at least a tenth okay.

      As a new mother, I used to cup my son’s downy head with wild tenderness and marvel at his heavy slump in my arms, and for the few moments his china-blue eyes fixed on mine before they closed, it was as if the sky had been boiled down and rendered into that small gaze. Those first months, I fed him from myself. And doing so felt like the first true and good act I’d managed in my whole slipshod life.

      Then I started drinking every day and stopped breastfeeding, and tonight, while holding the bottle to his working mouth, I averted my eyes for fear he’d see the gutshot animal I’m morphing into, which mirrors the mother I fled to keep from becoming, the one who shoved me off—Don’t hug me, you’re making me hot her tagline.

      Problem five, the husband: Should he come home early after work and grad school, should he round the corner and peer in with an expectant grin, I’ll shoo him away. Sex of the calf-roping variety still takes place, but otherwise, I’d felt so alone with my son that first year when night after sleepless night I’d gotten up while the husband slept like a hog in his wallow with a white-noise machine to mask the loud misery I gave off—now we connect at no point.

      Now nights, I sit downstairs on the porch and stare into the black hole of the garage, which, in my childhood cosmology, was where my oil-worker daddy sat in the truck and drank himself to death. After he staggered into the house to pass out—first bumping against the sides of the hall like a train conductor—I’d go out to the garage and stand with my back to the wall, waiting for the headlights of my mother’s vehicle to come swerving up the dead-end street we lived on. Through sheer force of will, I’d draw her drunk ass home alive. Daddy was steady and stayed. Mother was an artist and left. Those two opposing colossi tore a rip in my chest I can’t seem to stitch shut.

      The garage faces me like an empty pit, and I sit on the house’s threshold facing it till the edges of the square hole go blurry. If I were a real poet, I’d be composing a sonnet about the fairy mist in yon oak. Instead, I stare at my finger with dwindling success, for behind it, the view is getting wavery, and in an attempt to adjust, to regain my bearings, I tip my face up slightly into summer rain, which move makes the world take an unprecedented lurch. My head pitches back like a Pez dispenser. The postage-stamp backyard whips from view.

      I am leaning the top of my head against the door when I spot for the zillionth time—Problem Six?—the burnt-out lightbulb I fail every day to change, the cartoon idea I every night fail to get.

PART I

       Escape from the Tropic of Squalor

       I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,

       and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

       and it was miserable, for that’s how I thought

       poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

       literature.

      —William Matthews, “Mingus at the Showplace”

       They all followed a circuitous route, which very often took them to foreign countries, but led only to disintegration and death, and meanwhile their parents, their brothers and sisters and other relatives, drank themselves to death at home. … They existed in a ceaseless delirium of accusation and blame, which amounted to a deadly disease.

      —Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence

1

       Lost in the Golden State

       Here lies one whose name was writ in water

      —gravestone of John Keats

      Age seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific Ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest—a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils.

      No way am I going in that, I said, being a sissy at heart. My hair was whipping around.

      Easy and Quinn were unhooking their boards from the truck that had choked and sputtered through twelve hundred uncertain miles.

      Wasn’t that the big idea? Doonie snapped back, rifling through the back for towels and a wet suit. He was my best friend and maybe the biggest outlaw, point man on our missions. He tended to land the most spectacular girls. The ocean roar was majestic enough that I quoted Robert Frost:

      The shattered water made a misty din.

      Great waves looked over others coming in

      And thought of doing something to the shore

      Water had never done to land before …

      Pretty, Doonie said.

      Quinn spat in the sand and said, She’s always like Miss Brainiac, or something, or like she’s fine.

      He