The Liars' Club: A Memoir (10 page)

Then we were rushing away from the doctors and the sofa-lady, and the long hall that would have led us back to Grandma was getting longer and smaller behind us. The hospital doors hissed open, and the wet heat swamped over us. Mother needed a dish towel to hold the steering wheel.

She didn’t cry that day, though we tried to make enough quiet in the car to permit crying. Oh, at first I had climbed in the backseat babbling about wanting a towel to sit on and being thirsty, but Lecia had a way of grabbing ahold of me with a look that shut down any of my whining in a heartbeat’s time. It was a serious look coming off of her child’s face. I still think of the expression as senatorial. Her brown eyes sloped down at the corners, and the bangs above them were hair-sprayed into a row of shiny blond spikes. She could always nail me with that look, make me stop mid-sentence.

For some reason, we went to the Houston Zoo, which trip Mother must have bribed us with in advance. No sane person would have chosen to spend the afternoon outdoors in that heat. There was a miniature train running through it for free back then, and we climbed on. But it was crammed with the kind of spilling,
chewing, farting farm kids who made Mother nuts, so we got off at the gift shop.

She bought us Peter Pan hats with our names stitched on the sides in a loopy longhand. Then I played with the jeweler’s little Ferris wheel. You could push a button to stop it turning when you liked something, and I kept stopping it at a gold bracelet dangling with animal charms. She bought one for all three of us without my even asking. I remember that when the jeweler latched hers, he used his index finger to stroke the inside of her wrist in a way that brought the fear sharply back to my solar plexus. Even this didn’t make her say anything, though she was hell on any man touching her, and had once hit my uncle A.D. upside the head with her purse for pinching her butt.

Later, we ate burgers on round concrete picnic tables, which were oddly placed to get the full stink of the nearby monkey pits. Lecia mentioned what boneheads the doctors were as a way of taking Mother’s side against the hospital. But Mother just cocked her head as if she had no idea what Lecia meant. She drank black coffee and stared into the middle distance. She had long since passed the mark where she might normally have started railing against the medical profession or claiming that our miserable swamp climate was unfit for anything but snakes and cockroaches. Toward the end of the meal, I couldn’t sit in her silence anymore. It just weighed too much. I left the table to watch the monkeys. They were hurling what looked like their turds at each other. One little spider monkey broke away from the rest and stood at the edge of the pit with his bright red penis in his hand, screaming and jacking off furiously. Even that, Mother didn’t seem to notice.

The big cat cages also stank in the heat. This was before zoos built natural habitats with boulders and waterfalls, and the cages back then were painfully small, the animals miserable. The Bengal tiger had flies creeping all over its eyelids, and he didn’t even blink. There was a kid throwing peanuts at him, and Lecia somehow menaced the boy into stopping.

When I grew up and discovered the German poet Rilke, it was this zoo’s sorry-looking cats that I thought back to. As a young
poet, Rilke had been sent by the sculptor Rodin to study zoo animals, and he captured in a few lines the same frustrated power that I sensed that day in the dull-coated panther:

Looking back from this distance, I can also see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence. How small she seems in her silk dress, drinking stale coffee. I can see the panther pace back and forth behind the bars on the surface of her sunglasses, as if he were inside her peering out at us. Sometimes seeing her that way in memory, I want to offer her a glass of water, or suggest that she lie down in the shade of the willow behind her. Other times, I want to pull the glasses from her face, put my large capable hands on her square shoulders, and shake her till she begins to weep or scream or do whatever would break her loose from that island of quiet.

To get out of the heat, we went into a cavelike building, very cool and damp. At that time, I was fascinated with Dracula’s silky evil and headed straight for the vampire bats, which were disappointingly tiny through the thick glass. They were hardly bigger than field mice and hanging upside-down from a stick. Their teeth were tiny, not at all like Bela Lugosi’s on TV. One finally dropped down and wobbled near a petri dish of blood in the center of the display. He seemed so awkward trying to arrange his frail-looking wings that I kept thinking of a broken umbrella. Lecia moved from window to window, looking at owls and opossums and the other nocturnals—she wanted to be a vet back then, or a nurse. Mother sat on a stone bench under the red
EXIT
sign, smoking.
I got hypnotized waiting for the clumsy bat to drink the blood. I tapped the glass pointing it out, but he never did.

By dusk we were on the spaghetti freeways looking for Highway 73 home, and I kept cutting my eyes between my window, where the new glass skyscrapers going up just slid past, and the small rearview mirror, where Mother’s eyes were still eerily blank. Nothing showed in those eyes but the road’s white dashed lines, which seemed to be flying off the road and into the darkest part of her pupils, where they disappeared like knives.

After the amputation and that trip to Houston, we didn’t see Mother much. She either came home from the hospital briefly in the mornings to change clothes before heading back, or she returned after we were in bed. I would wake to her weight tilting our mattress, her Shalimar settling over me when she leaned in to kiss me and pull up the chenille bedspread, which had a nubble like braille under my hands. A few times, she would sit on my side of the bed all night smoking, till the yellow light started in the windows. She had a way of waving away the smoke from my face and making a pleasant little wind in the process. I kept my eyes closed, knowing that if I roused she’d leave, and I wanted nothing more from her on those nights than to let me lie in the mist of that perfume I still wear and to imagine the shapes her Salem smoke made. Inside the great deep pit that I had already begun digging in my skull, I had buried the scariness of Grandma’s hacked-off leg and Mother’s psychic paralysis at the zoo. So I did not long to talk of those things or to hear her reassurances about them. (Children can be a lot like cats or dogs, sometimes, in how physical comfort soothes them.) I could feel through the bedspread the faint heat of her body as she sat a few inches from where I lay, and that heat was all I needed.

Except for these apparitions of Mother, we were left the rest of the summer in Daddy’s steady if distracted care. At some point, the men of the Liars’ Club arrived with their pickups and toolboxes to turn our garage into an extra bedroom for my parents, who had been sleeping on a pull-out sofa in the living room during Grandma’s visit. I guess they wanted to make her a nicer
place in which to die. That didn’t register in me at the time. I had neatly blocked all glimmer of her very existence—alive or dead, sick or well—from my waking thoughts. Each morning, about the time that Lecia and I reached the bottom of our soggy Cheerios, somebody’s work boots would stamp up the porch steps, and the screen would bang open, and Daddy would start getting down clean coffee mugs.

The men arrived early and worked steadily through the hottest part of every day. They had all taken their vacations then in order to help out. They worked for nothing but free coffee and beer. By mid-morning they had stripped off their shirts. They had broad backs and ropy arms. They suffered the fiercest sunburns that summer I ever remember seeing. Ben Bederman had a round hairless beer belly that pooched over his carpenter apron, and his back burned and peeled off in sheets, then burned again until it finally darkened to the color of cane syrup. The men pulled Lone Star beers all afternoon from the ice in two red Coleman coolers that Daddy packed to the brim every morning.

A few times a day, somebody’s wife would show up with food. Say what you like about the misery of hard labor—I once had a summer job painting college dorms that I thought would kill me—but it can jack up your appetite to the point where eating takes on a kind of holiness. Whether there were white bags of barbecued crabs from Sabine Pass or tamales in corn husks from a roadside stand, the men would set down their tools and grin at the sheer good fortune of it. They always took time to admire the food before they started to eat—a form of modesty, I guess, or appreciation, as if wanting to be sure the meal wouldn’t vanish like some mirage. Daddy would stop to soak his red bandana in a cooler’s slush and study whatever was steaming out of the torn-open sack while he mopped himself off. “Lord God, look at that,” he’d say, and he’d wink at whoever had brought it.

Ben’s wife, Ruby, pulled in once with a washtub of sandy un-shucked oysters that it took two of the men to heave out of the truck bed. She spent the better part of a morning opening them with a stubby knife. When she was done, there were two huge
pickle jars of cleaned oysters sitting in the washtub’s cold water. We ate them with hot sauce and black pepper and lemon. (Lecia says that I would eat them only in pairs, so none would feel lonely in my stomach.) The oysters had a way of seeming to wince when you squeezed the lemon on them. They started off cold in your mouth, but warmed right up and went down fast and left you that musty aftertaste of the sea. You washed that back with a sip of cold beer you’d salted a little. (Even at seven I had a taste for liquor.) And you followed that with a soda cracker.

Before that summer, I had many times heard long-winded Baptist preachers take ten minutes to pray over card tables of potato salad and fried chicken at church picnics, but the way those sweating, red-faced men sat around on stacked pallets of lumber gulping oysters taught me most of what I know about simple gladness. They were glad to get fed for their labor, glad they had the force to pound nails and draw breath. Of course, they bitched loudly about their aches and mocked each other’s bitching. But unless I’ve completely idealized that fellowship, there was something redeeming that moved between those men. Even the roofing part of the job, which involved a vat of boiling tar and whole days on top of the new garage beyond the cool shade of our chinaberry, didn’t wipe it out. At evening, they would pull off their work boots, then peel off their double layers of cotton socks and lay them to dry across the warm bricks. Daddy had a habit of tipping the beer coolers out right where they stood in the grass, so cool water rushed over their sweaty feet. At that time of day, with night coming in fast, and the men taking a minute to pass a pint of Tennessee whiskey between them or to light their smokes, there was a glamour between them that I sensed somehow was about to disappear. When they climbed into the cabs of their trucks, I sometimes had a terrible urge to rush after them and call them back.

With Mother, I always felt on the edge of something new, something never before seen or read about or bought, something that would change us. When you climbed in the car with her, you never knew where you’d end up. If an encyclopedia salesman
happened to knock on the door, she might spend a month’s salary on books you would pore over all day. With Daddy and his friends, I always knew what would happen and that left me feeling a sort of dreamy safety.

By August they were done, and my folks had a paneled bedroom with a separate tiled shower. And out in back of the house, there stood a detached garage big enough for two cars. It also held a separate work studio for Mother, my father’s one nod to her desire to paint. The studio had a high ceiling and skylights, which were unheard-of in those days, and a black stove where she could build a fire on a rainy night. She wasted no time setting up her easel and starting to work in oils. The first thing she did was a portrait of Grandma wearing a plain blue dress. She worked from a Polaroid taken just before Grandma lost the leg.

Mother must have worked on it late at night after she came in from the hospital. God knows she had no other time. She’d even sacrificed her job at the paper to nurse Grandma. But the amber-colored sketch that first appeared on the white canvas turned into a facsimile of my grandmother inside of a week. I snuck the studio key off the nail in the kitchen to check its progress every few days. Truly, when I pulled the padlock off and the studio door swung open, I felt like a thief in church. I was entering a realm that had before only filled the bedtime stories, about artists of which Mother was fond: Van Gogh’s lopped-off ear; Gauguin’s native girls; the humpbacked Degas mad for love of his dancers; how Pollock once paid a fortune for a Picasso drawing, then erased it in order to see how it was made. The combination of turpentine fumes and damp wood smoke and the distant sting of vodka in the studio was unlike any other batch of smells before or since. The whole idea of erecting a person—from tinted oil and from whatever swirled inside my mother’s skull—filled me with a slack-jawed wonder.

The portrait of Grandma wound up stiffer, more formal than her other work, which was wildly expressionistic. The arms bend at right angles. The shoulders square like a military man’s, and the face is totally devoid of feeling. Maybe it was that blankness
that I was trying to fix when I squirted orange paint onto a sable brush and dabbed at the mouth. Ultimately, though, I left an orange smudge in the middle of the painting’s face. Maybe I was trying to blot her out somehow, or shut her up. If you’d asked me, I would have said I was trying to brighten her lipstick.

Mother wept when she saw it, wept and cursed the ignorant vandals who must have broken in. She never even asked whether one of us had done it. She got drunk wearing a Mexican serape and built a fire and cursed the Motherfucking Swamp and its occupants.
They do not
, she told us with terse judgment,
even deserve to call themselves members of the cordate phylum
, which Lecia had to explain meant that they didn’t have spinal columns, and were, ergo, like worms, slugs, and leeches. The next morning, Mother drove to the hardware store and bought a heavy lock you couldn’t get through with any bolt cutter. The new key stayed on the same kitchen nail, but after that, I was afraid of wrecking something else and so stayed out of the studio unescorted.