The Liars' Club: A Memoir (20 page)

Mother was another story. She had set down the drink when Grandma came home to die, out of necessity, I guess. Then she picked it up the night she got back from the funeral while we were all rubbing on her. She’d said could I fetch her some Gallo wine and 7-UP from under the china cabinet (a combination she likened to sparkling burgundy), and I said sure. Then I walked as slowly and miserably as any mule through any cotton row in order to assemble that drink.

The wineglass had a dusty yellow scum on it. That’s how long it had stood empty. I made a big show of scrubbing it off with a Brillo pad, then polishing the glass dry with a dish towel. If I thought anything at all, it was probably
This won’t hold much wine, not sparkled with 7-UP.
Mother had always been a binge drunk, not touching a thimbleful for weeks or months when she’d gotten her gullet full. But once she took that first drink, she was off.

That night she got home, she kept it down to that eensy glass of wine, after which she tumbled naked into her oversized bed and slept for twelve hours.

But at some point after New Year’s that wine made her hanker for alcohol of the high-test variety. Then, she dialed up the liquor store to order her vodka by the case, and she reached down the biggest jelly glass she could find in the cupboard. There was no need for ice or a measuring shot glass or even vermouth or those weird baby onions people who play at Gibsons make such a fuss about. The vodka was sloshed out in five-fingered units. Oddly enough, she hated the taste so much that she literally had to hold her nose to swallow the first one, like a kid taking medicine. But after that one, she downed them the way people in hell must down ice water.

The big game for me once she’d started drinking was to gauge which way her mood was running that I might steer her away from the related type of trouble. Hiding her car keys would keep her off the roads and, ergo, out of a wreck, for instance. Or I’d tie up the phone by having a running chat with the busy signal (seven-year-olds don’t yet have any phone life to speak of), so she couldn’t dial up any teachers or neighbors she was liable to bad-mouth. If I could thwart her first urges to call So-and-So or head down the highway to Yonder-a-place, eventually she’d get onto something else or just give up and pass out.

Lecia didn’t have the stomach for watching her that close, I think. She put herself in charge of counting Mother’s drinks. She kept a long-running tally of both the number of drinks poured and the approximate number of ounces consumed, which was no small feat if Daddy happened to be drinking too. And she did all the ciphering in her head, minus pen and paper, itself impressive. Having exact numbers always reassured Lecia no end. (When she got older and studied calculus, she even worked out a formula that factored into account the percentage of alcohol in various liquors—wine’s only about fourteen percent alcohol, for example—as well as how much time had elapsed from the first drink, whether Mother had eaten, and how much she weighed. She’d
then compare the outcome to that from another drinking bout in a way that sounded like this: “At Thanksgiving she was doing at least four ounces of eighty-six-proof alcohol per hour for four hours, and she weighed ten pounds less but was nowhere near this wild. Of course she’d eaten a lot.…”) The numbers seemed beside the point to me. You just never knew what would happen once Mother uncorked that bottle. The difference between two drinks and ten might not even show. So while my technical-minded sister counted, I myself zeroed in on the lines of Mother’s face and the timbre of her voice in hopes of divining the degree of Nervous she might get to.

One big tip-off to her mood came from what record she plopped on the turntable. If she was feeling high-minded, for example, she’d play opera.

Opera was a good sign, because she never really cruised for a plate-smashing fight with Daddy while listening to
Aïda
or
Carmen.
It made her remember New York, though, which had been the holy land of her youth and from which she felt exiled. (When I read about Napoleon defeated and shipped off to that squatty volcanic island, how he lay pouting for days in his bath about his lost empire, it put me in mind of Mother in Leechfield conjuring New York.) No sooner did the needle scratch down on an overture than she was back there. Going back usually brought her some relief. Her eyes would fog over, and her voice would go smoky. Then she took on that Yankee accent.

For some reason, I remember a particular night with
La Traviata
playing. The turntable was balanced in the window over the sink. Mother had on an old black turtleneck with little flecks of cadmium-yellow oil paint on the sleeves. She sat at the plywood bar in the kitchen, where Lecia and I were just finishing up crockery bowls of vanilla mellorine—a low-rent form of ice cream. Mother had tried to doctor the rubbery taste off the stuff with a chocolate topping she made from Baker’s chocolate and butter and real vanilla.

The memory gets sharp when I pick up that Mexican vanilla bean she kept in a sort of glass test tube. I thought,
Everybody
else’s mom uses oleo. Oleo and that fake vanilla high school boys drink fast for a buzz.
I hold that cool-feeling tube in my hand and study the bean. I’m trying to guess where Mother got such a thing. In the background, she’s telling Lecia about going to see Maria Callas at the Metropolitan Opera. The turntable plays “Parigi mi cara.” The vanilla bean in the tube is reddish black and wrinkled up like the snaky root of something, or a bird’s long claw. When I look past it, I see Mother’s face wearing that thousand-yard stare out the back door. Her jaw is jutting out and held tight to keep her East Coast lockjaw accent going.

The back door she’s staring through opens on a wet black night. You can smell banana from the tree she planted outside last summer (a plantain tree, really), and the thick sweet of honeysuckle. The cape jasmine bush has, for no reason at all, burst out these white waxy blooms. It’s winter and the bush shouldn’t be blooming at all.

Mother says the smell reminds her of the gardenia corsage she wore on her wrist that night she went to see Callas. She pulled up to the big fountain in a taxi behind a long black car with silver bud vases on the insides, next to the windows.

At this point, I pipe up that I’ve never seen a fountain, other than the water-drinking kind in school. And this whaps Mother loose from the memory for a second. She looks at me full in the face and asks is my childhood that deprived. Then Lecia says that I’m full of shit, that I’ve seen the fountain at the bank (the one high school kids are always putting soap bubbles in), and the other fountain at the Houston museum, not to mention umpteen-zillion fountains in books on Florentine architecture that Mother has dragged me through. Lecia says I’m just interrupting to hear myself talk and should shut up. And I say it’s Lecia who’s interrupting.

Mother finally sighs her stop-bickering sigh. For a minute she looks out the screen door at that big rectangle of semitropical night. We get quiet and watch her watching. Then the music surges a little, like a wave rising up, and she fades away from us, back into her Manhattan taxi outside the Metropolitan again.

She reminds us about the limo up ahead of her, and says that out of that limo comes a white satin high heel and the drapy tail end of a white sequined evening gown slipping under the hem of a coat that looked to her like sheared beaver dyed the color of cream. Then on top of that shoe and gown pours none other than Marlene Dietrich. (If Daddy had been present, he would have reminded us at length at this point that Dietrich had kissed him full on the mouth during a USO show. Hence my middle name: Marlene.) For a minute her eyes lock on Mother’s through the glass before the autograph hounds swooped around. Mother said that the wind had blown Dietrich’s white chiffon scarf over her mouth like a mask in that second, so at first all Mother could see was her red lipstick through the chiffon and her eyes peering out from above the scarf. “She had the loneliest eyes,” Mother said.

Then she gets the idea of showing me how to charcoal my eyes like Dietrich did. She strikes a big kitchen match off the rough underside of the table. She picks up my ice cream bowl and holds it up high and lets the match burn for a minute on the bottom, so there’s a gray smoke smudge on the crockery. Then she digs around in her pocketbook for the jar of Vaseline she always carries. She dabs a tiny sable brush in the Vaseline and swooshes it around in the soot on the bowl’s bottom.

She takes my chin in her left hand. She tells me to tilt my head back and make my eyes sleepy. Then she starts tickling at my eyelid with that brush. She goes on to say that I have the prettiest eyelashes in the universe. This matters to Mother because she’s only got lashes if she takes time to paste on false ones. “When I was pregnant with you, I didn’t care what sex you were, or if you had all your fingers and toes. I prayed to God you’d have long eyelashes.” She draws on her Salem for a minute, and we hang there in the smoke and the Shalimar and the vodka smell, waiting for her to exhale. She waves the smoke away from my face before she sets back to work on me, this time brushing at the hollow place above my eyeball in an arc. “My mother said God would send me a blue-headed baby with water on the brain for saying that kind of prayer. And I said, ‘Then that baby will
have pretty eyelashes,’ and you did.” This is also the first time she’s said word one about Grandma since she came back. I try to cut my eyes over to Lecia to figure out what such a mention could mean.

But Lecia has Mother’s compact in one hand and her mascara wand in the other. And I can see she’s worrying the mascara onto her lashes. Lecia is easily as broke out in eyelashes as I am, but Mother said mine were prettiest. It’s my face Mother’s holding. (In fights Lecia and I have as grown-ups, she’ll scream at me, “You were always so fucking cute!” And I’ll scream back, “You were always so fucking competent!” Which sums up our respective jobs in the family.) Mother steers my chin away from trying to sneak a look at Lecia, then it’s just Mother and me again. I can feel her breath in light puffs on my nose. She rears back and looks at me, then starts to smudge at what she’s done with her thumb pad above my eyeball. She’s painted oil portraits of us before. We’ve sat in our Sunday clothes on the raised model’s platform in her studio, watching her step out from behind the easel and study us all cool-eyed, but this is different. This is up close. Her hands feel like kid gloves and she is working right on my face, like she’s using all her attention to paint me right into being. (I am Marlene Dietrich. I am the cathedral wall on which the painter Giotto outlines an angel.)

The memory turns to smoke right there. It floats out the door over the cape jasmine. But there were a lot of nights that winter when Lecia and I sat watching Mother drink and hearing her grieve for New York.

She always told us about famous people, though she was all we wanted to hear about. Instead, she described the Ink Spots swaying over a silver microphone in some Harlem nightclub, and how Bing Crosby once smoked marijuana on somebody’s penthouse terrace under a big, buttoned-up moon.

She liked to repeat a story about seeing Einstein lecture at Bell Labs (where she’d done some mechanical drawing in the war years—a detail it took us years to unearth). She swore that during the question period afterward, Einstein had to have some engineer
in the auditorium explain an elementary law of mechanics to him. When the guy was shocked that the great physicist didn’t know such a simple thing, Einstein said, “I never bother to remember anything I can look up.” She loved that idea—a genius who couldn’t open a can of tuna fish but could order the entire universe in the caverns of his own skull. She also said that he bowed his head between questions like he was praying, then raised it up to give answers like those mechanical swamis wearing turbans that guessed your future for a quarter at Coney Island. At the crowded reception after the lecture, she claimed that nobody even tried to talk to him. He sat in a straight chair in the corner by himself looking like somebody’s daffy uncle.

The opera also tended to get Mother hauling out art books. I can still see them stacked on the plywood next to her Flintstone jelly jar of vodka, the gold names in square letters on the big leather spines: Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne. (The pictures themselves were being seared into my head with all the intensity of childhood. When I stumbled on the actual paintings years later in museums, I often lapsed into that feeling you get when stepping inside your old grade school, of being tiny again in a huge and uncontrollable world—and yet the low-slung water fountains tell you that you’re a giant now. Van Gogh’s
Bedroom at Arles
, when I stood before it at eighteen, seemed ridiculously small, yet intensely familiar.)

Opera had a big downside, though. It could lead Mother straight into the worst sort of crying jag. Some Italian soprano would start caterwauling how she lived for art, or some tubercular female would rasp out (in Italian, of course)
Come to Paris and be my breath
to her old boyfriend, and Mother would go weepy. Her face would settle into a series of faint lines you normally didn’t see on her. Then she would bawl like a sick cat, hanging her head in her hands, blowing her nose on toilet paper, and saying that we didn’t understand, and that it wasn’t our fault she was crying. Like we cared whose fault it was instead of just wanting it stopped.

Lecia didn’t exactly figure out how to stop it. She did learn
how to lower the volume on it, though. She would lead Mother to bed when she got too slobbering and miserable. I don’t know how my sister knew to do this, but she moved with such certainty that Mother would often pad along behind her to that oceanic bed, where she’d collapse. Lecia would then rustle around in the pajama drawer, ignoring all the silky rivers of lingerie that I would have chosen in favor of some heavy flannel men’s pajamas that felt like sleep itself. Then she’d get a pitcher of ice and a big glass for Mother’s morning thirst, and a jar of orange baby aspirin for the headache.

Those were the opera nights. The jazz nights were a little worse, and worst of all were the nights when Daddy was home, and Mother put on the blues.