The Liars' Club: A Memoir (12 page)

Then I was standing on my porch by myself. I could hear his tennis shoes slapping away down the street. I watched the square of his white T-shirt get smaller till it disappeared around the corner.

The honeysuckle was sickly sweet that night. I stood outside for a long time. I tried to arrange my face into nothing special having happened. There was a gray wasp nest in the corner of our porch. It had chambers like a honeycomb, each with the little worm of a baby wasp inside, sleeping. I thought sleeping that way would be good. After a while, Daddy pulled open the door and shoved the screen wide and asked me had I been at the game. “Come in, Pokey. Lemme fix you a plate,” he said. I still fit under his armpit walking in. You could hear a roar from the park as somebody turned a double play or got a hit. I thought of the boy climbing the bleachers toward his admirers. I thought of all the jokes I’d heard about blow jobs and how a girl’s vagina smelled like popcorn.

I looked at my father, who would have climbed straight up those bleachers and gutted this boy like a fish, and at my mother, who for some reason I imagined bursting into tears and locking herself in the bathroom over the whole thing. Grandma in her
wheelchair would have said she wasn’t surprised at all. Lecia was at the game, probably at the top of the bleachers combing down her bangs with a rattail comb and laughing when this boy came climbing toward her. He didn’t even have to threaten me to keep quiet. I knew what I would be if I told.

By mid-fall, the cancer had spread to Grandma’s brain. This would have sent most people to bed, according to an oncologist pal of mine. But Grandma just bore down on us harder. If anything, whatever pain she was in or ideas she had about dying seemed to jack up her resolve.

She didn’t take morphine or any other pain drugs. Instead, she drank beer nonstop but never seemed to get drunk. She stopped wearing her prosthetic leg, claiming it hurt her, so her stump poked out of her nightie at about eye level to a kid. That gave the impression—when she wheeled toward you—of some finger pointing you down. And it was around this time that her eyes seemed to get more bleached out behind her horn rims. Maybe she had cataracts, or maybe I just imagined the whole thing. But the blue part was lightening up daily, and sharp white spikes stabbed out from the black pupil into the iris. This was the time when you could order X-Ray Specs from the back of Superman comics, and when lasers were just starting to make the Walter Cronkite reports. In some weird conjunction of these two phenomena, I started believing that Grandma watched me through the wall when I slept. Sometimes I’d start up from a dead sleep thinking that two hot beams of white light were coming out of
her eyes in the next room, fixed on me, trying to bore right through the wall between us. Nights, I wouldn’t look out the door when she clunked around trying to get to the bathroom. I was scared that I’d see something like little headlights beaming her path down the dark hall. Actually, I wasn’t so scared of seeing this as I was of her seeing me see it, which knowledge might make her angle those beams on me and melt me like wax.

Basically, I tried not to notice her at night at all. When I was about five, I had cooked up a technique that kept me from throwing up when I rode the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair. If I tightened my stomach muscles and squinched my eyes shut and grabbed the chrome front bar as hard as I could, then the ride’s sick bucking around didn’t reach me somehow. Oh, my hair still twisted every which way, and I could feel the lights move across my face, but it was like I could sink back into myself, away from all the diesel engine’s heaving, and not wind up horking my corn dog all over Lecia’s penny loafers. I got famous in our neighborhood for being the littlest kid to ride the scary rides. Anyway, that’s what I tried to do in bed when I heard Grandma thumping around, just hunker down and harden up till everything I was fit into a small stone I held in place behind my stomach muscles.

Mother was her own kind of rock. She seemed distracted all the time, moving in some addled way through the rising sea of chores Grandma thought up. The only time she displayed much more than a low-level pulse was when Grandma talked her into spanking me about once a week, and then only if I really fought back.

Don’t get me wrong. My mother’s flailings at me didn’t bring enough physical hurt or fear to qualify as child abuse. Her spankings were more pathetic than anything. She was way too scared of hurting anybody to hit with much of a sting. She must have been scared, too, of her own temper, or of feeling anything at all, because, as I said, she stayed pretty blank-eyed no matter what we did unless Grandma hollered her into action. At one point, Lecia and I emptied a box of Tide on the kitchen floor, then dragged in the garden hose till the whole house, carpet and all,
was running with suds about a foot high. (We were imitating a floor wax commercial.) Grandma happened to be asleep during this, and Mother just sent us outside to play, then set about mopping the whole mess up without so much as a cuss word.

But some kind of serious fury must have been roiling around inside her. Sometimes, instead of spanking us, she would stand in the kitchen with her fists all white-knuckled and scream up at the light fixture that she wasn’t whipping us, because she knew if she got started she’d kill us. This worked way better than any spanking could have. Your mother’s threat of homicide—however unlikely she tries to make it sound—will flat dampen down your spirits.

Anyway, her whippings, when they did come, were almost a relief given the spooky alternative of her silence. And they didn’t last very long if you stood still, as Lecia had the sense to do. Me, I never stopped trying to break loose for a second, which protracted the whole thing. (My spankings were a kind of family sporting event complete with rounds and what my sister still claims was a system of scoring more subtle and intricate than the mating signals of certain spiders.) Unless Mother managed to get me down in a corner, she would have to hold one of my wrists to keep me within flyswatter distance while she flailed in my direction. At best, she made contact about ten percent of the time. I dug my heels into the gray carpet and used my weight as you would in crack the whip. I became the pivot point in the spankings, a jerking, central force that she had to wheel around.

Locked together this way, the two of us would spin from room to room with Grandma at our perimeter in her wheelchair, scolding and bitching and calling down the wrath of God on that spoiled ungrateful child, all the time seesawing the big wheels of her chair to keep herself in position.

I hold a distinct image of Lecia’s face, the distant sister as referee. She is standing in the doorway, grinning and shaking her head about how hard I am making things. (Being spanked is never near as bad as being laughed at during the spanking. Trust me. The presence of another kid ups the humiliation quotient exponentially.)
Mother’s arm makes a shadow on the wall rising and falling with the flyswatter, and with every turn I make, Lecia’s smile slides off of me as if she’s saying,
You don’t have the sense to pour piss from a boot
—then I wheel around the room one more time before coming back to that weary grin of hers—
with the instructions on the heel.

I almost felt a weird power over Mother during such a time. She had ahold of me, at least. And her grip felt like she would hang on no matter what I yanked her through.

By this time it was hurricane season. And just the way the weatherman on TV explained how hot and cold air fronts could smack up against each other over open water and make a wild-assed storm that turned around a still center of blue sky miles wide, so I felt almost calm during these whippings, as if all the misery in our house whirled around me somehow. Getting spanked at least brought some motion and force to the surface of the household. You could see us spinning around the room crazy instead of just walking through the day quiet and fretting about how miserable everybody felt and wondering where the ghost of that misery would pop up, and in what form.

In school when I stumbled on the famous Yeats poem about things falling apart, it was the spin of those spankings I thought back to, where the falcon breaks loose from its tether and from the guy who’s supposed to be holding it:

I always loved that last part, about the best lacking all conviction, which phrase made me think of Mother. And the worst being full
of passionate intensity always put me in mind of Grandma, who was nothing if not intense.

Of course, at that time, Mother was still hanging on to the shreds of what she thought right, a grip she would lose entirely after Grandma died.

One morning, while Mother was plaiting my hair, the old woman got all pumped up about some project she had read about once in a magazine. She only took about two bites from a bowl of buttered grits before she hauled herself off to Kitty’s Hobby Shop. She didn’t even strap on her leg or bother with the wheelchair. Mother set her in the car seat, and she just drove off to town, then sat behind the steering wheel till Kitty came out to the parking lot and said could she help. We also heard later that she stopped by the hardware store for a three-foot length of industrial rubber tubing. Grandma came home with this stuff in paper bags and locked the door to her room for the better part of the day. When she finally rolled into the living room at dusk, she was waving a tasseled horse quirt over her head like Annie Oakley. She had braided long leather strips in brown and beige and tan around the rubber tubing, which instrument she wanted Mother to use for whipping us.

It was the only time I ever saw Mother defy her head-on, and Grandma was batshit about it: “These children are being ruined! You think you have trouble now, you just wait.” Mother started crying but shook her head about using the quirt. She wouldn’t meet Grandma’s eyes, but she stood in one spot with her arms folded and shook her head no. She was studying her own feet the whole time.

Then the old woman went on to waggle her quirt tassels at Lecia and call her Belinda, just like she’d done in the hospital. “I hope Belinda does to you what all you’ve done to me,” Grandma said, staring hard at Mother and waggling the horse quirt at Lecia the whole time. Again I got that dim stab of fear that this lady who bossed our mother’s soul didn’t even know our right names.

Lecia tried to make peace by saying that she wouldn’t mind so much getting whipped with a horse quirt. It was no worse than
Daddy’s belt or the limber chinaberry switches Mae Brown had been known to cut from the backyard. I said that I wasn’t some old barnyard mule and didn’t want to get whipped like one. Grandma pointed out to Mother how I thought I was in charge of my punishments. This seemed to her undeniable evidence that I needed my butt blistered. I aggravated her worse by saying that all the baths and whippings I’d got since Grandma came were “warping my character.” That’s a direct quote, according to Mother, who started to laugh and shake her head. Then she asked would I get her some orange baby aspirin because she felt like she had an ax in her forehead. (She became a terrible baby-aspirin junkie at this time, ate them like peanuts from an economy-sized jar with a depressing label on which two pink-cheeked Swedish-looking children trudged off to a red schoolhouse hand in hand.) She hung the quirt on the doorknob of her new bedroom and continued to conduct our whippings with either the flyswatter or a rolled-up
New Yorker.

Daddy was never around after Grandma came home. It was some unspoken deal everybody had. Since she thought that he was low-rent and since she was herself dying, she sort of trumped him into staying away from his own house. He worked days and pulled a lot of double shifts. On days off, he fished till it turned squirrel season. Then he hunted.

One Saturday, he brought home dozens of squirrel tails for me to play with. The tails had bloody stub ends where they’d been lopped off, and I remember pinning them all together with clothespins and looping them around my neck, which grossed Lecia out. I think I fancied myself, in this squirrel-tail stole, some cross between Greta Garbo and Daniel Boone.

Lecia put herself in charge of cooking squirrel gumbo. She had a recipe for a black and garlicky roux that a Cajun neighbor lady had taught her. One whiff of that gumbo will make some gland draw up in the back of your throat and ache. Yankee gumbos are full of tomatoes and okra and all manner of pussyfied spices, but that game gumbo Lecia fixed—made with squirrel or duck or deer sausage—came together out of nothing quite so pretty. Instead
it was mixed up from things you cannot live without—lard and flour and onion. It was a thin, black, elemental soup that opened your sinuses from the three kinds of pepper and left you tasting garlic and sassafras root for days after. Grandma said just the smell of the roux browning made her want to hork. She took Mother out for shrimp rémoulade at Al’s Seafood. (Shrimp rémoulade, I might explain here, was my grandma’s moral antidote to all those little split-up squirrel carcasses dismantled and frying in fat.) The shrimp are blanched pink, peeled and deveined, then hooked over the side of a sundae dish like the legs of so many young girls hanging over the edge of a swimming pool. The sundae dish may get piled up with shredded lettuce in the middle just for show. The rémoulade sauce is an extra-lemony kind of mayonnaise that has the muted luster of good pearls.

When the car backed out to take them to the restaurant, the headlights streaked across the kitchen wall behind Daddy. He sat in his string T-shirt at the table he’d built from sheet plywood and clear varnish. He held his spoon the way I later learned guys in jail are supposed to. He looped his arm around his plate so it was sort of guarding the bowl from somebody snatching at it. Positioned like this, he scooped the gumbo into his mouth in a steady motion that didn’t stop till the bowl was clean. I still had the squirrel tails looped around my neck and said didn’t it hurt his feelings that they wouldn’t eat what he’d brought home. The idea made him laugh. “Shit, that’s okay too, Pokey,” he said with a lopsided grin. “Just more squirrel for me and you.”