The Liars' Club: A Memoir (15 page)

When we hit Port Arthur, Texas, Mother started to sing under her breath. It was an old song she liked to play on our turntable when she was drinking. She had a scratchy recording of Peggy Lee or Della Reese, one of those whiskey-voiced lounge singers:

Nobody in my family can sing a note. The few times we went to church with neighbors, Lecia and I had the good sense to lip-synch the hymns so it wouldn’t be too noticeable. My mother, too, had a bad voice—wavery and vague. She was a natural alto who’d probably been nagged into the higher ranges by overfeminine choir teachers. So she sang the wrong words in a ragged soprano under her breath that morning, whispery and high. The car seemed to pick up speed as she sang, and the fear that had been nuzzling around my solar plexus all morning started to get
real definite when I saw, dead ahead of us, the gray steel girders of the Orange Bridge.

The Orange Bridge at that time was said to be the highest bridge in the country. Your ears popped when you drove over it. The engineers had built it that tall so that even tugs shoving oil platforms with full-sized derricks on them could pass under with room to spare. The Sabine River it ran over wasn’t very wide, so the bridge had easily the sharpest incline of any I’ve ever crossed.

Not surprisingly, this was the scene of a suicide every year or so. Jilted suitors and bankrupt oilmen favored it. Those who jumped from the highest point of the bridge broke every bone in their bodies. I remember Mother reading this fact out loud from the paper one time, then saying that women tended to gas themselves or take sleeping pills—things that didn’t mess them up on the outside so much. She liked to quote James Dean about leaving a beautiful corpse.

Anyway, it was this bridge that the car bumped onto with Mother singing the very scariest part of “Mack the Knife.” She sang it very whispery, like a lullaby:

The car tipped way back when we mounted the bridge. It felt sort of like the long climb a roller coaster will start before its deep fall. Mother’s singing immediately got drowned out by the steel webbing under the tires that made the whole car shimmy. At the same time—impossibly enough—we seemed to be going faster.

Lecia contends that at this point I started screaming, and that my screaming prompted Mother to wheel around and start grabbing at me, which caused what happened next. (Were Lecia writing this memoir, I would appear in one of only three guises: sobbing hysterically, wetting my pants in a deliberately inconvenient way, or biting somebody, usually her, with no provocation.)

I don’t recall that Mother reached around to grab at me at all. And I flatly deny screaming. But despite my old trick of making my stomach into a rock, I did get carsick. The bile started rising in my throat the second we mounted the bridge, which involved the car flying over a metal rise that felt like a ski jump. We landed with a jolt and then fishtailed a little.

I knew right away that I was going to throw up. Still, I tried locking down my belly the way I had on the Tilt-A-Whirl. I squinched my eyes shut. I bore down on myself inside. But the rolling in my stomach wouldn’t let me get ahold of it. I wouldn’t have opened my window on a dare. And I sure didn’t want to ask Mother to pull over mid-bridge. Lecia was in charge of all Mother-negotiations that day anyway, and she had opted for the same tooth-grinding silence we’d all fallen into. Even though she was normally devout about watching the speedometer and nagging Mother to slow down (or, conversely, Daddy to speed up), she kept her lip zipped that morning. Anyway, at the point when I felt the Cheerios start to rise in my throat, I just ducked my head, pulled the neck of my damp T-shirt over my nose and away from my body a little, and barfed down my shirt front. It was very warm sliding down my chest under the wet shirt, and it smelled like sour milk.

Mother responded to this not at all. Neither did Grandma, who had a nose like a bloodhound but had turned into some kind of mannequin. Really, she might have been carved from Ivory soap for all the color she had. Lecia would normally have seized the opportunity to whack me for being so gross. Maybe I even wanted whacking, at that point. Surely I wanted to break the bubble of quiet. But Lecia just tied her red bandana around her nose like a bank robber and shot me a sideways look. I knew then it was one of Mother’s worst days, when my horking down my own shirt didn’t warrant a word from anybody. Lecia watched Mother, who watched some bleary semblance of road.

Anyway, that’s the last thing I remember before the crash—Lecia’s bandana drawn over her nose.

Then for some reason I still don’t understand, the car went into
a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin. I don’t know if this was accidental or deliberate on Mother’s part. As I said before, Lecia holds that I was wailing and Mother was turning around to swat at me. I do remember seeing Mother turn the wheel sharply to the left, which forced the car into a spin. After a long time whirling around, I saw the railing on the other side of the bridge rush forward. Then for an instant, we were launched in the air. Our tires just left the bridge altogether. The car jumped the raised pedestrian walkway and flew toward the top rung of the railing. (People never walked over, of course, but workers hung platforms off it for painting and repairs). I saw the rail flying laterally at us. Then the car crunched to a stop. By this time I was screaming and crying.

Amazingly enough, the crash just crumpled the front fender and took out the right headlight. Nobody seemed that rattled about what happened but me. Mother didn’t even get out to inspect the damage. Grandma just hunkered more deeply over her lace. Mother said, “Everybody all right!” but in a cheery voice, like a camp counselor after a long hike. She didn’t even turn around when she said it. In the mirror her teeth were showing in a scary smile.

I was really howling by this time. The car got thrown in reverse, and we unpried ourselves from the rail. We bounced off the opposite walkway backward and headed down the slope, gaining speed.

Lecia slid over about this time and laced her fingers with mine, for which kindness I remain grateful. I can’t have smelled very good. Plus I was blubbering. Big tusks of snot were hanging out of my nose. Anyway, she just took my big hand in her big hands. (We both have hands perfect only for fieldwork and volleyball.) I always felt safe when she did that. Usually it shut me up, too, but this time I whispered why was Mother trying to kill us and was she really going stark crazy. Lecia just said to pipe down, that we’d be at Auntie’s house in twenty minutes and everything would be okay then.

But at Auntie’s house, everything wasn’t okay. We’d escaped
the storm, all right. Hurricane Carla couldn’t reach us. Still, stepping down from that car, which was hissing and clicking from having been driven so hard, I didn’t feel any relief. Somehow Aunt Iris’s dirt yard under the tall pines wound up looking as dark to me as Leechfield had. I felt no grace. I had no urge to kiss the ground like some cartoon sailor delivered from shipwreck. The spotted bird dogs that circled my feet got only the most distracted pats before they whined their way back to the porch.

Auntie (pronounced Ain’tee) walked right to me through that pack of dogs, flapping her apron at them and saying to me how was the ride down, sugar? Then I heard my voice saying fine, which lie was beginning to come naturally to me. I was fine. The ride was fine. We were fine. My fear was too great for me to say more; it was so great, in fact, that I couldn’t let myself collapse sobbing into Auntie’s soft and calico-draped bosom. The only need I could state was the obvious one for a bath. The dogs had even shied away from me. They crouched low to the earth and sidestepped back to the porch, circling each other and whining. They had long spotted muzzles, and their yellowed eyes kept watching.

I cannot, however, describe Auntie’s face from that day, or the welcoming faces of my cousins and uncle, who came out to greet us. I must have kept my gaze dog-level. Then even the dogs begin to get dimmer in memory, as if a heavy gauze is being wrapped around my eyes, and all I could see were the faint outlines of those beasts—sniffing and suspicious. I was turning the volume down. I was hardening up inside for another tough-bucking ride.

Grandma was put to bed in Auntie’s back bedroom, and I got a bath. These things certainly registered as improvements over our sitting around in Leechfield, cut off from Daddy and waiting for a tidal wave to smash the house. But Mother’s spooky silence held, and my father’s father—himself seemingly older than Jesus—almost immediately took Grandma’s place as an emblem of death.

My grandpa Karr was well up in his eighties and nowhere near dying. Still, everybody had been predicting his imminent death
since I could remember. This and the suggestion of his Indian heritage gave him the kind of authority that I now think old people ought to have. But back then, I resented it. He didn’t have to do any chores. He wouldn’t even bother turning up his hearing aid half the time when you talked to him. He barely even said hello. Mostly he just sat in a cane-bottom rocker on the front porch while people brought him food or pipe tobacco, coffee or iced tea depending on the time of day. He had taken up this bad habit of sometimes climbing on top of things when left unwatched—the barn or a car roof, the shed, almost anything. Aunt Iris told us about it before she went off to work at the drugstore. He’d once even shinnied a fair ways up one of the tall pecan trees that stood in the yard. So Lecia and I were each given a dime by my cousin Bob Earl to watch him. The idea was that if he started climbing, we’d run and fetch our cousin, who was tending Black Angus cattle in the back field. Grandpa sat rocking and chewing on his pipe and sometimes singing a song about lost coon dogs that Mother couldn’t stand because it was so backwoods country.

I remember we felt torn between watching Grandpa, who looked like something set in concrete and unlikely to budge, but whom we had been paid to watch, and keeping track of Mother, who looked spring-loaded on serious trouble.

We finally made a compromise. Lecia would sit outside, with her back to the door screen, watching Grandpa. (I would give her my dime for this service.) I, in turn, would sit inside with my back against her back and the screen door watching Mother, who had the TV tuned to hurricane news. She had also built a fire in the front-room hearth, even though it was plenty hot already. She just sat poking at that fire, the sweat pouring down her face,
which was lacquered red by the flames. She had pushed her thick hair back from her face with one of those black stretchy headbands. It fanned out all around her face in a sort of corona. She looked as scooped out and sunk in on herself—she was just squatting there poking at the fire with the cast-iron poker—as any human being I’ve ever seen before or since. She was hard for me to watch, so I watched TV instead—the white greaseboard map on Kirbyville Weather—and more footage of palm trees flattening out in wind.

I wanted to call Daddy. I even talked to the long-distance operator about this. But she said she couldn’t put me through to Leechfield because all the circuits down that way were busy. I said did that mean there were too many calls on the trunk lines or that Daddy’s phone out at the Gulf was broken. She said she didn’t have time to talk about it and unplugged me.

I looked around at Lecia’s plaid cowboy shirt pressed up against the screen grid. After a while, I decided I had to pee and went into Auntie’s bathroom.

Coming out, I noticed Grandma’s hand hanging down off the side of the bed in the back room. I tiptoed in. It was a small, musty-smelling room. Auntie kept a big white freezer packed with deer and squirrel and duck meat in there. The white iron bed, narrow and sagging, sat alongside the freezer. Grandma’s glasses were also on the floor, so I knew she was asleep. I thought to put the glasses on the nighttable, then at the same time maybe snitch her sewing scissors so I could spend some time cutting newspaper snowflakes or making myself a cootie-catcher back in the living room. Grandma’s eyes were mostly closed, sort of rolled up in her head so just white half-moons showed when I peered in.

When I squatted down to grab the glasses, I could see that she’d spilled something on the lenses, something pink and sticky-looking, so the little red ants we called sugar ants were crawling over the glasses. The previous spring I had liberated all the ants in Lecia’s glass ant farm (I’d felt bad they were locked up), and had since been looking to snare some new ones for her. It had
been a prizewinning science project. I was trying to figure out a way to shoo the ants off one arm of the glasses and trap them in a shoebox I found under the bed, when I noticed Grandma’s hand.

It was curled partway open. The fingers almost touched the floor. And running in a track down the very white part of her arm was what I first thought to be a scratch or an eyebrow-pencil line. But the line was moving. I bent right next to her. Then I made out how she’d spilled that cough medicine or red soda pop on the inside of her arm, and the sugar ants were crawling up and down eating it off, and she didn’t even feel it.

I don’t know if I thought she was dead or what. All I knew was her state at that instant was way more than I’d bargained for. I backed out of the room and went back to the living room. I sat with my back flat against the screen so I could feel Lecia’s vertebrae bumping against mine in a way I liked. I sat right there till Mother went in and found Grandma and started screaming.

My daddy watched Hurricane Carla come up the Intercoastal Canal from the Gulf. He claimed to be high in a sort of crow’s nest at the time, behind a thick glass wall that let him look out over half the county. The crow’s nest was on a giant tower facing the refinery, beyond which lay the oil-storage tanks, and finally the canal, a glorified ditch that Houston oilmen had spent a fortune having dug so they could boat their oil from offshore rigs right to the refineries. Daddy later said the tower swayed back and forth in the gale. He and Ben Bederman swore they had to hold on to the countertops while the rolling chairs slid around. Through the observation window, they watched a gray wall of water twenty feet high move up the canal toward town. I can almost see my daddy cock his head and squint like it was some animal he was tracking in the distance. He even took a minute to point with his ropy arm when he was telling the story, like the tidal wave was coming right at us that minute. “It was like a whole building made out of water,” he said. I later had cause to wonder how his view was so clear in the midst of the storm. But hearing him tell it, you would never doubt he’d somehow actually cowboyed his way through it all.