The Liars' Club: A Memoir (34 page)

They also shot a sliver of pissed-off into Mother’s voice. Even my asking for lunch money—if it struck her as off the subject somehow—could send her tearing around in search of a misplaced wallet, slamming doors behind her, or lead her to scream at the always sleeping form of Hector that he was a lazy sonofabitch. Don’t get me wrong. Mother didn’t go off every time you asked for something, and she had always been prone to temper fits. But
on the diet pills a smaller spark could set her off. And the rages could carry her further. When Lecia and I finally figured out how to pronounce the magic word on the diet-pill label—metham-phetamine—we used it in a jump-rope rhyme:

Mother did get thinner. She used an ice pick to poke extra holes in her alligator belt. Plus her tolerance for alcohol—always high—seemed to go up. She drank all day and night without throwing up or passing out. The Yankee accent that had always cued us in to how drunk she was turned into her standard manner of talking.

Even scarier was the fact that she never slept. I don’t mean that she didn’t sleep much, or slept less. I mean all those months, we never saw her asleep. Ever. No matter how late I woke and went scooting downstairs on my pajama butt past the winding stair rods, I could find her downstairs drinking, usually alone with a book on her lap.

She read more and more books by guys with more and more unpronounceable names, saying existentialism was the philosophy of despair. Lecia took to hiding what I called those “French-fried” books down deep in the magazine rack, for they got Mother talking in a misty-eyed way about suicide. She would gaze up from the page and say that for some folks killing yourself was the sanest thing to do. And the rare calm in her voice those times must have set Lecia fretting about the specter of Mother offing herself. We never spoke that worry out loud. But if Mother lingered too long and too quiet in the bath, Lecia might take up a post outside the locked door, her head cocked, listening with an intensity that always put me in mind of my cousin’s hunting dog at a stand of quail. Lecia seemed to hold her breath those times, listening with her whole self for the slightest scuttle to suggest something alive.
If I went scampering down the hall humming to myself and ignorant of her worry, she’d wheel my way and press her finger hard against her lips to shush me, her face twisted into a mask of anger. Speaking a word like “suicide” aloud was unthinkable. We didn’t dare give it breath for fear of invoking it.

In fact, we’d become superstitious enough to stop playing with the Ouija board. After the spirit of Grandma started spelling out how she was broadcasting to us from H-E-L-L, Lecia stamped on the planchette till it splintered. I pitched the board into the field of nettles behind our house. We both started any meal off by tossing salt over our shoulders, even times we hadn’t spilled any in the first place. And walking to school, we skipped every sidewalk crack. I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through.

Mother’s misery was also sneaking up inside me somehow. One night after Hector passed out, she found me lying wide-eyed in bed next to the lump of quilts that was Lecia. She sat down on the mattress edge and read to me by the hall light from
The Myth of Sisyphus
, her bible at the time, by Albert Camus, whose name she taught me to pronounce right, so nobody at any future cocktail party would ever tease me for a hick.

Sisyphus had it way worse than all of us, it seemed to me, being doomed to sweat and grunt pushing a boulder up a mountain all day and night without rest. The punch line was that once he got to the top of the mountain, the rock just rolled back down. So he had to push it up again, over and over. This happened forever, Mother said, closing the book. With my head lying deep in the trench of my pillow, I was still waiting for some moral, or happy ending, a reward for all that work. I must have said as much, for at some point she tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and told me there was no more point to Sisyphus’ task than
there was to washing dishes or making beds. You just did those things endlessly till your body wore out, then you died.

The first French sentence I learned might well have come from that book.
Il faut souffrir
, one must suffer. For some reason, suffering got lined up in my head not with moral virtue or being good, as it had with the Baptist kids back home, but with being smart. Smart people suffered; dumb people didn’t. Mother had said this back in Texas all the time. We’d be driving past some guys in blue overalls selling watermelons off their truck bed and grinning like it was as good a way as any to pass an afternoon. She’d wag her head as if this were the most unbelievable spectacle, saying
God, to be that blissfully ignorant.
Daddy had always countered that message, for he took big pleasure in the small comforts—sugar in his coffee, getting the mockingbird in our chinaberry tree to answer his whistle. Without him, Mother’s misery was seeping in. Happiness was for boneheads, a dumb fog you sank into. Pain, low-level and constant, was a vigil you kept. The vigil had something to do with looking out for your own death, and with living in some constant state of watchful despair.

Meanwhile, the world was draining itself of color before my eyes. The sky was grayer than ash, clouds close and vague as chalk smudges. Trees lost their leaves. Through the venetian blinds in our parlor Lecia and I watched autumn slip into winter like a slide show. For several days our neighbors raked, their kids jumping into the piles with dogs of various sizes bounding on the edges. It was like something from a Kodak commercial. Then the piles got burned in culverts and trash cans in front of the big colonial houses all up the block. Wasn’t it weird, I said to Lecia in the bath one night, how we thought of trees having leaves as being “normal,” when in fact six months out the year they were necked as jaybirds.

At school, I looked around at the dazed and sleeping kids, my peers—one boy drooling onto graph paper, another folding together a cootie-catcher. Even the monitor, the principal’s daughter, who was supposed to be the smartest kid in class, was at that instant blissfully outlining her own hand in pencil. They didn’t
seem to mind being there so much, which I couldn’t for the life of me figure, for it was all I could do to tromp through a day without screaming or breaking all my pencils or just kicking somebody hard in the shin.

Mother and Hector went away twice, both times to Mexico, I think. She’d cooked up a scheme to buy a tract of land down there for the purpose of founding an artists’ colony, some new place for her to paint, though she hadn’t hit a lick at a canvas since we’d got to Colorado. The truckload of art supplies she’d ordered sat untouched in a spare room. I was itching to break the seals on the new tubes of oil, dozens of them lined up by shade in a leather briefcase, but knew better. The clean brown palette with the hole for your thumb never got a single, bright turban of color squirted on it. The sable brushes of all sizes kept their paper wrappers on. The canvases she’d bought already stretched and primed white sat around the edges of that room like windows on nothing. Lecia and I made up titles for their emptinesses: “Polar Bears in a Snowstorm” and “Talcum Powder on the Moon.” She never painted in Colorado, and they never bought any land in Mexico. They just drank and fought and flew back both bent over double from diarrhea, which Daddy had always called the green-apple shits.

The first time, they left us with Hector’s cousin, a girl of about twenty who was cheerfully raising two toddlers by herself on welfare. We called her Purty. She was small and birdlike, with a tumbling mass of black hair that she tried to tame by rolling it on soup cans at night, and still it frizzed and seized up in waves around her heart-shaped face. Purty’s kids were easily the world’s most miserable toddlers, which she didn’t mind one bit, being tickled silly by every blubbering fit one threw. “Poor nanito,” she’d coo, when all I could think was how to smush a pillow across its face to stop its breath altogether. They weren’t twins but have landed in my memory as exact replicas of the same baby, both slobbery-mouthed and worried-looking. They also had freakishly huge heads that wobbled on their necks and whapped into table corners, or could pitch them forward off-balance from sheer
weight. Lecia learned quick how to plug one up with a pacifier or a bottle of cold milk. Me, I pouted, reading in the corner.

The second night we were there, Purty’s roving husband showed up drunk and pounding on the back door. He was raving in a slurry Spanish I could barely make out that he’d come to claim his kids, whom, by the way, I would have been hard-pressed not to part with. But Purty yanked the soup cans from her hair so bobby pins scattered all over the dark bedroom with a skittery noise that put me in mind of East Texas roaches scrambling. She shoved Lecia and me under the bed with the babies to keep them quiet. She said he’d kill us all if we made a peep. Lying under that bed, I watched her fuzzy pink scuffs slide her away from us into the strip of light from the kitchen.

Quiet was hard for me. I’d rarely played hide-and-seek without being first found. Plus, the baby I’d been charged with keeping still hardly fit under my arm, being fat and squirmy and smelling—through the powder and baby shampoo—like nothing so much as clabbered milk. There were spiderwebby threads hanging from the bedsprings right in my eyelashes, and the floor through the cloth of my pajama top was a clean slab of ice.

While the voices got louder in the kitchen, the baby got squirmier and noisier. Lecia finally elbowed me in the head to do something, so I clapped my hand over its sloppy mouth. In the course of this, though, my index finger somehow poked between its lips. For a second I felt a few stubs of tooth in what otherwise seemed like endless slippery curves of gum, the baby’s fat tongue writhing like a slug. Something about my finger in that mouth seemed so grotesque that when the baby set to gnawing on my knuckle like a teething ring, I reached down my free hand and pinched it on the thigh, pinched it with all my might, which amazingly enough, made it fall quiet lying under me. Under the backwash of guilt I instantly felt about having hurt a baby was a deep pleasure at such blatant meanness, the soft flesh giving way between my fingers like Play-Doh. No sooner had I done it than I longed to do it again. I didn’t dare, of course, for fear the
baby would start wailing again, instead of just making the low-level sniffle I’d decided was okay.

After what seemed a long time, a tremendous crash came from the kitchen, glass shattering. Footsteps headed down the hall to the front of the house before Purty broke out screaming “Murder, Murder!” Her husband’s car peeled from the drive.

He’d shoved her face through the back-door glass, it turned out. But that scene has melted from my head. We must have rushed in and found her bleeding and screaming, and the babies must have hollered something awful. Still, I only keep a picture of Purty very patiently explaining to the red-faced highway patrolman exactly how her husband had choked her throat, then smacked her face into the glass, so she’d heard shattering around her ears and felt the rush of cold air from outside. Her face was all nicked up, and tiny spangles of glass had settled around the flowery yoke of her pink nightgown. The ambulance guy was rigging up a butterfly bandage on a gash that had severed her arched eyebrow into two neat wings.

The next time Hector and Mother traveled, we stayed with his sister Alicia, whom I’d have guessed was too old and fat to fight with her husband, Ralph. She wore long gray braids twisted over her head like an opera singer and stood close to the ground, being about as wide as she was tall. But sure enough, she was standing at the stove frying tortillas one night and bickering with Ralph about car insurance when he lunged at her. Alicia was quick, though. She hit him square on the forehead with the iron skillet’s bottom, and that stopped him in mid-lunge. When he finally swiveled down to the floor, it looked like an afterthought. At breakfast the next morning, Ralph had a blue knot on the center of his forehead like a goat’s horn trying to break through.

After that last fight at Alicia’s house, I flat pitched a wall-eyed fit over the prospect of being left overnight with anybody, which tantrum killed Mother’s trips to Mexico. She wore down staying in Antelope. She even began to pace window to window the way she had in Texas.

I wandered downstairs about three one morning and found Mother sitting in her peach silk wrapper at the piano. She’d twisted pin curls on the top of her hair, the slightly longer part, so the short sides stuck out and put me in mind of duck feathers. There was a long-stemmed glass of red wine on the piano bench next to her, a Salem burning cool blue smoke from the crystal ashtray. Her ragged copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s
Nausea
was propped on the piano’s music stand.

She mixed me some burgundy topped off with 7UP, to help me sleep, she said. She brought it from the kitchen in her fanciest bone china cup, the one with gasolinelike rainbows somehow fired into the white background. It had cherries painted on it—inside and out—and gold on the rim where you put your lips, and even swirls of gold down the handle and around the saucer edge. Mother set that cup next to me on the square resting spot above the keyboard. The 7UP bubbles rose through the red wine like lava from way far down in the earth’s core.

Before that night, I’d had lots of liquor—real champagne even, at somebody’s wedding. And I’d cared for it not one whit. Oh, on a hot day with oysters, I liked a taste of Daddy’s salted beer okay. But more than a few sips left me dizzy. And whiskey or scotch, even mixed with Coke, scalded me inside like poison.