The Liars' Club: A Memoir (11 page)

When Grandma came back to our house she had ossified into something elemental and really scary. She seemed way thinner than she had been in the hospital, though perhaps not as pale. She had been fitted with an artificial leg that she strapped on every morning. It wore a sturdy black shoe that never came off. At night, she detached the leg and stood it by her bed. Once, when I passed her door on my way to the toilet, I caught sight of it standing there with no person tacked on top of it, and it was casting a long shadow into the hall that nearly reached my bare feet, so I scrambled back under the quilt with Lecia, my heart thumping, not caring whether I wet the bed that night (I did). The honeysuckle that grew up our screens made spiky wall-shadows on nights like that. Sometimes I’d hear Grandma hop down the short hall into the bathroom, her cane whacking the door molding. Lecia says that I misremember one specific sight of her standing in our doorway with that stump bluntly hanging down under her nightie, her arms spread so she could hold herself up by the doorjamb, and her hair fanned out around her face like
white fire. I can see it like yesterday’s breakfast, but Lecia claims it never happened.

Grandma wore very pale pink nylon pajamas with a matching robe, and her wheelchair was spookily silent in the way somebody walking never was. With Daddy’s 3-In-One oil and the same maniacal patience she had brought to tatting, she kept it tuned silent on purpose. She’d upend the chair by her bed and squirt oil in all the tiny hollow places so it was nothing but glide. Then she could materialize soundlessly around a corner. She had a habit of sneaking up on Lecia and me and shouting
Aha!
as if she’d discovered us shooting up heroin with a turkey baster or eviscerating some small animal. Once she found us playing gin rummy and let out her
Aha!
, then called Mother. Grandma even watched us the whole time she was yelling as if we were going to cover up the cards before Mother got there. “Charlie Marie! Come in here and whip these children. I swear to God…” Mother, who never excelled as a spanker, arrived and asked some bewildered questions. Grandma gave an evangelistic-sounding lecture on the evils of gambling (and liquor, oddly enough), this despite the fact that she’d been an avid cheater at church bingo (and was, since her surgery, consuming about a case of beer every day). After a while, Mother just gave in to Grandma’s rantings and went through the motions of flailing at our legs with a flyswatter till we ran into our room and slammed the door. I remember crawling up in Lecia’s lap and whining about how I hadn’t done anything. Lecia reasoned that we’d probably gotten away with fifty things we should have been spanked for that day, anyway, so we should just call it even.

It was sometime in August that I started walking in my sleep. Actually I did things other than just walk: I’d go squat behind the living room drapes and go to the bathroom in a pile they sometimes didn’t find till the next morning. Once I wandered outside, and Daddy had to come chasing after me.

That fall my school career didn’t go much better. I got suspended from my second-grade class twice, first for biting a kid
named Phyllis who wasn’t, to my mind, getting her scissors out fast enough to comply with the teacher, then again for breaking my plastic ruler over the head of a boy named Sammy Joe Tyler, whom I adored. A pale blue knot rose through the blond stubble of his crew cut. Both times I got sent to the principal, a handsome ex-football coach named Frank Doleman who let Lecia and me call him Uncle Frank. (Lecia and I had impressed Uncle Frank by both learning to read pretty much without instruction before we were three. Mother took us each down to his office in turn, and we each dutifully read the front page of the day’s paper out loud to him, so he could be sure it wasn’t just some story we’d memorized.)

He let me stay in his office playing chess all afternoon with whoever wandered in. He loved pitting me against particularly lunkheaded fifth- and sixth-grade boys who’d been sent down for paddlings they never got. He’d try to use my whipping them at chess to make them nervous about how dumb they were. “Now this little bitty old second-grader here took you clean in six plays. Don’t you reckon you need to be listening to Miss Vilimez instead of cutting up?” When Mrs. Hess led me solemnly down the hall to Frank Doleman’s office, I would pretend to cry, but thought instead about Brer Rabbit as he was being thrown into the briar patch where he’d been born and raised, and screaming
Please don’t throw me in that briar patch!
At the end of both days, Uncle Frank drove me home himself in his white convertible, the waves of kids parting as we passed and me flapping my hand at all of them like I was Jackie Kennedy.

It was also at this time that I came to be cut out of the herd of neighborhood kids by an older boy. Before that happened there was almost something sacred about that pack of kids we got folded into. No matter how strange our family was thought to be, we blended into the tribe when we all played together. For some reasons, I always remember us running barefoot down the football field together, banking and turning in a single unit like those public-TV airplane shots of zebras in Africa.

But obviously I had some kind of fear or hurt on me that an
evil boy could smell. He knew I could be drawn aside and scared or hurt a little extra. When he came for me, I went with him, and my going afterwards felt as if it had been long before plotted out by something large and invisible—God, I guess.

But before that boy singled me out, the sheer velocity of running across a wet field with other kids felt safe. There were dozens of us. We ranged in age from thirteen or fourteen for the big boys down to Babby Carter, who at two trailed behind the herd everywhere. I was seven and fit into the group about dead center, age-wise. I was small-boned and skinny, but more than able to make up for that with sheer meanness. Lecia still holds that I would have jumped a buzz saw. Daddy had instructed me in the virtue of what he called equalizers, which meant not only sticks, boards, and rocks, but having one hell of a long memory for mistreatment. So I wouldn’t hesitate to sneak up blindside and bite a bigger kid who’d gotten the better of me a week before. To my knowledge, I never slouched off an ass-kicking, even the ones that made me double up and cry. It might take me a week or so, but I always came back. (To this day, I don’t know whether to measure this as courage or cowardice, but it stuck. After I grew up, the only man ever to punch me found himself awakened two nights later from a dead sleep by a solid right to the jaw, after which I informed him that, should he ever wish to sleep again, he shouldn’t hit me. My sister grew up with an almost insane physical bravery: once in the parking lot outside her insurance office, she brushed aside the .22 pistol of a gunman demanding her jewelry. “Fuck you,” she said and opened her Mercedes while the guy ran off. The police investigator made a point of asking her what her husband did, and when she said she didn’t have one, the cop said, “I bet I know why.”)

In some ways, all the kids in my neighborhood were identical. Our fathers belonged to the same union. (“Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers, Local 1242” was how they answered the phone on Daddy’s unit.) They punched the same clocks for almost exactly the same wage. (Our family had been considered rich because of Mother’s part-time newspaper work.) Maybe one kid’s daddy
worked Gulf and another Texaco and another Atlantic Richfield, but it amounted to the same thing. Maybe one was a boilermaker and another controlled the flow of catalyst in a cracking unit. But they all worked turning crude oil into the various by-products you had to memorize by weight in seventh-grade science class—kerosene, gasoline, and so on. The men all worked shift work because that paid a little better, so all of us knew how to tiptoe on days when the old man was on graveyards. The union handed out cardboard signs that ladies tacked to their doors:
SHHH! SHIFT WORKERS ASLEEP.
Nobody but Mother had ever been to college. (She’d attended both Texas Tech and art school.)

When the football field was cut on weekends, we’d gather hay from behind the tractor and lay it out in lines that followed the same square floor plans our fathers had unrolled on blueprints when their GI loans were approved—two bedrooms, one bath, attached garage, every one. The cut brown clover and St. Augustine grass smelled wetter and greener than any field cuttings I ever encountered in my adult elsewheres.

It’s that odor that carries me to a particular cool day when I lay down within the careful lines of my own grass house. I was sure that I could feel the curve of the earth under my spine. I watched the clouds scud behind the water tower. Then I rolled over on my stomach. There were wild pepper plants that had hot little seeds you could pop between your teeth. Clover squeaked when you pulled it out of the ground, and its root was white and pulpy sweet.

Once I got stung by a bee, and this older boy I mentioned doctored me with a plaster of spit and mud till I stopped my snubbing. So I believed he liked me, and I was thirsty for liking.

On the hot days, when running was forbidden—heatstroke was always bringing little kids down—we played a game some kid invented called Torture. This sounds worse than it was. A bigger kid would herd us into the skin-tightening heat of the most miserably close spot we could find—the spidery crawl space under the Carters’ back porch, say, or Tommy Sharp’s old pigeon cage, or some leftover refrigerator box waiting for the garbage truck.
There we’d squat into the hunched and beaten forms we thought made us look like concentration-camp inmates. This evil boy had a picture of Buchenwald survivors in his history book. All of us collectively studied it, memorized it. We did so not out of any tender feeling for the victims’ pain or to ponder injustice, but so we could impersonate them playing Torture. We lined up shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh under the cold dull eye of this big boy’s Nazi. He didn’t twist arms or squish heads or inflict wounds. He was too smart for that. He just reigned over us while our parents called us home for lunch. We hunkered down without moving. I imagine all those bodies when crammed into a tight space generated temperatures well over a hundred and twenty degrees. Blinking or whimpering wasn’t permitted. We melted into a single compliant shape. It was almost a form of meditation. The world slowed down, and your sense of your own body got almost unbearably distinct. Sweat rivered down my rib cage. I could feel every particle of grit in the fold of my neck. The Nazi boy would menace us not with overt cruelty but with an empty professional stare. There was no need to switch-whip us; we didn’t dare move anyway. That was the whole game. We sat there together, radiant with misery. Eventually, of course, some adult arm would poke into where we were hiding and signal the arrival of somebody’s mom come to pull us out and drag us home for lunch or supper.

And it was one of these times—an evening, oddly enough—when the arm felt around and didn’t find me huddled in the corner, that all the other kids poured out and scattered to their separate homes for supper, so this big boy and I were left alone.

It was going dark when he got hold of me under God knows what pretext. He took me into somebody’s garage. He unbuttoned my white shirt and told me I was getting breasts. Here’s what he said: “You’re getting pretty little titties now, aren’t you.” I don’t recall any other thing being said. His grandparents had chipped in on braces for his snaggly teeth. They glinted in the half dark like a robot’s grillwork. He pulled off my shorts and underwear and threw them in the corner in a ball, over where I knew there
could be spiders. He pushed down his pants and put my hand on his thing, which was unlike any of the boys’ jokes about hot dogs and garden hoses. It was hard as wood and felt big around as my arm. He wrapped both my hands around it, and showed me how to slide them up and down, and it felt like a wet bone encased in something. At some point, he tired of that. He got an empty concrete sack and laid it down on the floor, and me down on top of that, and pumped between my legs till he got where he was headed. I remember I kept my arms folded across my chest, because the thing he’d said about my breasts seemed such an obvious lie. It made me feel ashamed. I was seven and a good ten years from anything like breasts. My school record says I weighed about fifty pounds. Think of two good-sized Smithfield hams—that’s roughly how big I was. Then think of a newly erect teenaged boy on top of that and pumping between my legs. It couldn’t have taken very long.

(I picture him now reading this, and long to reach out of the page and grab ahold of his shirt front that we might together reminisce some. Hey, bucko. Probably you don’t read, but you must have somebody who reads for you—your pretty wife or some old neighbor boy you still go fishing with. Where will you be when the news of this paragraph floats back to you? For some reason, I picture you changing your wife’s tire. She’ll mention that in some book I wrote, somebody from the neighborhood is accused of diddling me at seven. Maybe your head will click back a notch as this registers. Maybe you’ll see your face’s image spread across the silver hubcap as though it’s been flattened by a ballpeen hammer. Probably you thought I forgot what you did, or you figured it was no big deal. I say this now across decades and thousands of miles solely to remind you of the long memory my daddy always said I had.)

When he was done with me it was full dark. I unballed my clothes and tried to brush off any insects. He helped me to pull them on and tied my Keds for me. He washed me off at the faucet that came out of the side of somebody’s house. The water was
warm from being in the pipe on a hot day, and my legs were still sticky after.

Our porch light was amber. The rest of the houses were dark. You could see the spotlights from the Little League park and hear the loudspeaker announcing somebody at bat. I wondered if this boy had planned to get ahold of me way in advance, if he’d picked the time when everybody would be at the game. Which was worse—if he’d only grabbed me at the opportune moment, or if he’d plotted and stalked me? I couldn’t decide. I didn’t want to be taken too easily, but I had been, of course. Even at seven I knew that. On the other hand, the idea that he’d consciously chosen to do this, then tracked me down like a rabbit, made me feel sick. He walked me home not saying anything, like he was doing a baby-sitting chore.