The Liars' Club: A Memoir (46 page)

In fact, after Mother and Daddy married, she wrote for the kids,
but they were too big by then. “They didn’t want to come,” Mother said. The stepmother sent a letter to that effect. “Then it was like a big black hole just swallowed me up. Or like the hole was inside me, and had been swallowing me up all those years without my even noticing. I just collapsed into it. What’s the word the physicists use? Imploded. I imploded.”

Those were my mother’s demons, then, two small children, whom she longed for and felt ashamed for having lost.

And the night she’d stood in our bedroom door with a knife? She’d drunk herself to the bottom of that despair. “All the time I’d wasted, marrying fellows. And still I lost those kids. And you and Lecia couldn’t change that. And I’d wound up just as miserable as I started at fifteen.” Killing us had come to seem merciful. In fact, she’d hallucinated we’d been stabbed to death. “I saw blood all over you and everything else. Splashed across the walls.”

As to why she hadn’t told us all this before—about the marriages and the lost children—her exact sentence stays lodged in my head, for it’s one of the more pathetic sentences a sixty-year-old woman can be caught uttering: “I thought you wouldn’t like me anymore.”

The next day Lecia hired a detective to find the lost kids, who were kids no longer, of course, being well into their forties by then. They were also damn eager to be found. Within weeks of our first phone call, they arrived at Mother’s house, bright and fresh-faced and curious as all get-out.

That reunion’s their story, really, one I could not presume to tell, except to say it marked a time when our house began to fill with uncharacteristic light.

Mother and I didn’t foresee that result in the Mexican café. We wobbled to our feet. Our table was littered with pitchers, cocktail napkins soppy wet and shredded, a forest of stemmed glasses. Lime rinds rested in the smoldering ashtray. I looked down at it all, weaving from what seemed a great height. Salt from the various tortilla baskets had spilled across the checkerboard cloth. All afternoon, I’d been using my butter knife to scrape the crystals up into white lines, arranging them in geometric shapes, like some code you might find on a cave wall. For some reason the
designs pleased me no end, like some unreadable testament we were leaving. I hated to think of the busboy sponging them up.

We were grim-faced crossing that restaurant. We leaned together like cartoon drunks. Our high heels barely held us up. We bumped table edges and sloshed and apologized and righted ourselves and went back to our single-minded forward lurching. Bright piñata shapes I hadn’t seen before loomed from strings above us—bull and clipper ship, crucifix, five-pointed star.

In the dusk outside, the low sun made me squint. It was hot. We spread newspapers on the car seat before sliding across. The chrome inside would blister you. I used a blue Kleenex to pinch the ignition. Once I cranked it, hot air blasted from the slatted AC vents. I shifted to reverse. The sky above us was going from musky yellow to purple. Colors of a cut plum, Mother said.

I pulled onto the freeway thinking of Daddy in that aluminum bed like some old ideogram of himself. Since Dr. Boudreaux had told me to prepare for his death, I always drove home picturing an ambulance parked in the driveway; a corpse on the inside stretcher with white sheet draped over its features. But five years would pass before Daddy died, paralyzed, light enough for me to lift into his wheelchair, an act that always made him giggle and coo like a baby. He was oddly happy at the end. He adored the white cat Bumper, who came home from the vet still mute and miraculously wired together, to coil on Daddy’s sunken chest purring, or on the laps of nurses we hired till our money ran out.

That day in the car, I only knew we were late getting home to relieve Daddy’s nurse. In the slap of tires on the road’s melted tar, I heard the ashy voice of my own fear hissing
Daddy’s dead, Daddy’s dead.

Mother was crying softly beside me. She slipped on her sunglasses. The white oil tanks sliding off the lenses still seemed primordial to me. As a kid, I’d thought they were dinosaur eggs and worried about what might hatch out of them. They cast humped shadows across the refinery yards. We drove past them. The fence running alongside us went from the industrial hurricane’s diamonds to barbed wire that sloped in parallel lines from
post to post, behind which were broad rice fields, rich green stalks leaning every which way, almost heavy enough to harvest.

Then the fence vanished, and the dissected fields gave way to a foggy riverbank spilling morning glories. Dark was closing in. We hit a long stretch of roadside bluebonnets that broadened to a meadow. Here and there in the flowers you could make out small gatherings of fireflies. How odd, I thought, that those bugs lived through the refinery poisons. Beyond Mother’s tired profile, the fireflies blinked in batches under spreading mist like little birthday cakes lighting up and getting blown out.

I didn’t think this particularly beautiful or noteworthy at the time, but only do so now. The sunset we drove into that day was luminous, glowing; we weren’t.

Though we should have glowed, for what Mother told absolved us both, in a way. All the black crimes we believed ourselves guilty of were myths, stories we’d cobbled together out of fear. We expected no good news interspersed with the bad. Only the dark aspect of any story sank in. I never knew despair could lie. So at the time, I only felt the car hurtling like some cold steel capsule I’d launched into onrushing dark.

It’s only looking back that I believe the clear light of truth should have filled us, like the legendary grace that carries a broken body past all manner of monsters. I’m thinking of the cool tunnel of white light the spirit might fly into at death, or so some have reported after coming back from various car wrecks and heart failures and drownings, courtesy of defib paddles and electricity, or after some kneeling samaritan’s breath was blown into stalled lungs so they could gasp again. Maybe such reports are just death’s neurological fireworks, the brain’s last light show. If so, that’s a lie I can live with.

Still, the image pleases me enough: to slip from the body’s tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes grow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.

“Karr captures, exactly, what it’s like for a girl to kiss the first boy she loves.… She captures, exactly, what it’s like to start high school.… She captures, exactly, what it’s like to be a book-hungry teenager, enraptured by the words and heady ideas that offer transport from the banalities of small-town life.… As she did in
The Liars’ Club
, Ms. Karr combines a poet’s lyricism and a Texan’s down-home vernacular with her natural storytelling gift.”

—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times

“A compelling ride through [Karr’s] adolescence…What distinguishes Karr is the ability to serve up her experiences in a way that packs the wallop of immediacy with the salty tang of adult reflection…her descriptions of the bruised-lip, druggy wonder of teenage love are precise, unsentimental, and lovely.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“
The Liars’ Club
left no doubt that Mary Karr could flat out write…the one question everyone had upon finishing her story was, could she do it again?
Cherry
lays that question to rest once and for all.… It never lacks for those trademark Karr details, but it’s about all of us.”

—
Newsweek

“A smart, searing memoir…Romance, in all of its wondrous and heart-breaking incarnations, is Karr’s great subterranean subject, the ground upon which her wily, whip-smart writing catches root.”

—Lisa Shea,
Elle

“Stunning.… If
The Liars’ Club
succeeded partly because of its riveting particularity,
Cherry
succeeds because of its universality. The first book is about one harrowing childhood, the second about every adolescence. She can turn even the most mundane events into gorgeous prose.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“
Cherry
is the kind of book a brave parent could do a lot worse than to give to a teenager.… Teenage girls might come away from it knowing that they’re not freaks, that mistakes aren’t fatal, and that good writing kisses just about everything better. And for teenage boys, reading
Cherry
would be like stealing the other team’s playbook.… Mary Karr gives memoir back its good name.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

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