Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

of Mother’s from the technical university where she’d gotten her teaching degree, he sported a meager russet beard with a skunk stripe and a French accent I later learned was fake. He’d first materialized on our sofa one morning, shoeless, his coat draped across him. The conventioneer’s name tag pasted to the breast pocket—apparently printed by the wife I never met—read, DON’T BRING HIM HOME HE’S GOT THE CAR!!!

      I liked the sentences he could spin out in midair, with commas and clauses and subclauses woven through. I liked how he oohed at the poetry I’d been encouraged to press on him since about age eleven. It was tricky to find the right moment—after I’d faked interest in Ming porcelain but before he got too lubricated to talk right.

      Having not seen him since I was in grade school, I felt pushy showing up in his office brandishing recommendation forms. But he’d said on the phone I could come, so I leaned in his open door slot to ask was he busy.

      He sat behind a desk sprawled with papers, hands interleaved before him as if by a mortician. He closed the door behind me, then steered me to a chair facing his desk. I figured he’d decided against recommending me, having found the poems and essays I’d sent him in advance dim-witted. I felt oafish before him. No sooner did he sit down than he bobbed back to his feet like he’d forgotten something. He walked to my side and—with a kind of slow ceremony I did nothing to stop—lifted my T-shirt till I was staring down at my own braless chest. With his trembling and sweaty hand, he cupped first one breast, then the other, saying, By God, they’re real!

      Such was the interview that landed me in a school far beyond my meager qualifications.

      For years I stayed grateful that the whole deal had been fast—a small price to pay for getting out of Leechfield. Though it was smaller than more violent assaults that had happened as a kid, which I paid for longer, it touched the same sore place—did I draw these guys somehow? But for ten years or more, when I was spent or hurt and totting up unnecessary gloom, his bearded face would float to mind, and I’d conjure a deep fry pot big enough to lower the pasty bastard into. Later, I pitied him more, for he was no doubt writhing in his own private hell. Which point is moot, since by now the worms have eaten him, and slowly.

      What’s a typical journey to college? I couldn’t tell you. I hope my son, Dev, had one last summer. His dad was staring owlishly into the computer screen, trying to download music, while I slipped folded shirts into fiberboard drawers and ran extension cords. Before I left, Dev heard a series of moist-eyed platitudes till he said, Mom, don’t Polonius me with this nagging. Still, he hugged me—his huge form ripe with shaving lotion—hugged me right in front of his backward-ballcap-wearing roomies. Dev’s parting words: Love you. Don’t forget to mail those CDs.

      My passage involved three blue-ribbon hangovers and the genial loneliness of a South American novel and an image of Mother charging out of a liquor store in blinding sun holding a gallon of vodka aloft like a trophy.

      On the morning Mother’s yellow station wagon deposited me at a dorm and pulled away from the curb, I was seventeen, thin and malleable as coat hanger wire, and Mother was the silky shadow stitched to my feet that I nonetheless believed I could outrun. I didn’t cry when she pulled away, for there were cute hippie boys playing guitar cross-legged on the lawn, but my throat had a cold stone lodged in it. I was thirsty.

3

       Lackluster College Coed

       … I had a friend who thought the secret

       was turning a turntable backwards.

       One pill made you stronger, one pill

       and you could fly. I had a friend

       who crashed us through a cornfield

       and all the husks could do was sing,

       but that was all right, it was singing

       that mattered to us, had weight,

       occupied space, in motion tended

       to stay in motion, in rest rest.

       You start with a darkness to move through

       but sometimes the darkness moves through you.

      —Dean Young, “Bright Window”

      When Mother and I had taken off for college, Daddy had stood on the back porch under the clothesline with the white cat slung over his shoulder like a baby he was burping, and he swore he’d come visit his first vacation. He said, Come Halloween, Pokey, at the latest. Old Pete’ll come walking up the road, making the rocks fly high. So stop that snubbing, you and your momma both. Make me wanna hork.

      He spoke these words out of his own wet face, wiped with the back of his rawboned hand, but it was all bullshit, his promise. I knew, and he knew I knew. Between us stood the tacit contract that come vacation time, old Red would need Daddy’s help nailing asbestos siding up at his camp, or our backyard fence would require mending, or so-and-so would be laid up and Daddy could use the overtime. He’d never set foot on this campus. His drinking schedule had become too inviolable. Plus, these college folks with whom I was hobnobbing wouldn’t know how to speak to a man who’d graduated grade six and spent days off cleaning his squirrel gun.

      In our household, I’d been assigned Daddy’s sidekick. Starting as a toddler, I’d kept a place standing beside him in his truck, and for the rest of his days, his lanky arm still reflexively extended itself at stop signs, as if to stop a smaller me from pitching through the windshield. But all through my drug-misty high school years, Daddy had floated through the house with an increasingly vacant stare, leaving a wake of Camel smoke.

      Over time, I followed the books Mother set down like so many bread crumbs to her side, and soon she was leaning in my doorway to hear Otis Redding or the sardonic Frank Zappa squawk. Once, she’d coiled my hair into a pinned twist that matched her own and we’d sat in an opera house half floodlit as a mournful soprano pined: Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore—I lived for life, I lived for love. That was Mother’s altar. Forget our scattered Sunday sorties into yoga and Christian Science. The theology Mother pored over—Buddhism mostly—was more theory than pursuit, and Lord knows why they baptized my sister, Lecia, Methodist. But I saw the shine in Mother’s eyes as that opera washed over her.

      Which music Daddy cared diddly for. The volumes that towered around Mother’s bed were partly stacked up to block him out. For his part, a book was a squatty form of two-by-four—useful, say, for propping open a window with a broken sash.

      Yet at college, I never stopped expecting to find Daddy reborn beside me, showing me how to tie a slipknot, or run a hunting blade under a rabbit’s hide so the blue carcass could be disassembled and peppered and dredged in flour. And crossing the campus as leaves scratched along the sidewalks, I could sense whatever thinly stretched rubber bands on my back that once tethered me to Daddy had already snapped.

      How he’d taught me to talk—Y’all fixing to go to class?—busted up the average midwesterner. Even his voice on the dorm phone could draw a crowd. Kids who answered tended to ape the drawl I’d started to lose, mimicking Daddy, they sounded like cornpone hillbillies from Hee Haw.

      But I missed him enough to write a letter swearing fealty to the very self I was smothering:

      Dear Daddy:

      Thanks for the five-spot. You didn’t have to do that, since I have actual jobs making money. The food service feeds me like the little oinker I am. You’d just put your head under the milk spout and guzzle. I know you would. Thanks to all this chow, I’m weighing over a hundred again, so I’m less of a gimlet ass.

      There’s a really nice art history teacher named Armajani (he’s from Iran)