Lit (11 page)

O
ne day Lecia rings me up. Tawdry, she says.

An adjective meaning crude or trashy or otherwise unseemly, I say. Talk to me.

Mother’s sleeping with Harold, she says, meaning Daddy’s pill-popping nurse, crashing of late in the spare room.

Never happen, I say. That man has got to be gay.

Happened, she says. They showed up drunk last night, talking about the hustle contest at Get Down Brown’s.

Lecia lives two hours from our hometown, but her former secretary saw Mother and Harold necking. I wonder were they doing this with Daddy in the house!

Who knows? Lecia says. Daddy’s so out of it, he may not have twigged to it anyway. If anything, he likes Harold better than Mother.

Harold’s nicer, I say. Way nicer.

And he used to work at the jail, Lecia says. I wonder if they practice safe sex.

We both went quiet till I add, She needs to get an AIDS test.

Tawdry, Lecia says.

Tawdry, I say, and hang up.

So vivid is Mother’s story of her final drunk with Harold—so painterly in its grotesque detail—that I take the liberty of recounting as if I were there, for a good story told often enough puts you in rooms never occupied. The way other families keep wedding videos or log dates in a Bible, mine stores in the genetic warehouse alcohol-fueled catastrophe.

I’m the voyeur as Harold tries to zip Mother into her red sequined top, a close fit on her sixty-two-year-old frame. You need to spray some PAM on me, Mother says. Before the mirror, she sucks in her cheeks and rouges a terra-cotta stripe in the cheekbone’s shadow. He tugs down on the blouse hem and she feels her zipper pop midback.

Whoa, she says. I can feel a breeze in here. She takes a sip of Harold’s banana daiquiri as he checks her out from behind.

I’ll safety-pin it, he says.

After draining the glass, she holds up the empty, saying, And do me.

He opens the refrigerator, on which Mother has painted a bulbous hippolike old woman, nude in a floppy hat.

Hippos are their theme animal, Mother and Harold’s. In the months since I’ve moved Daddy into the home, the old house has sprouted hippos all over. Money I’ve sent to help out has partly been used for the bloated, nappy furniture they laze on—also for redoing the bath, where Mother painted another cartoonlike mural of twin hippos, which I fear echoes the two of them nude together.

Mother dials the phone while telling Harold to put some britches on. The silky polyester shirt he slides into has zigzag lightning bolts. Once the buttons are fastened, the front puckers.

In our apartment in Cambridge, the phone squeals, and I holler to my husband, who’s typing in the next room, That’s her.

Don’t answer it, he says. I know he’s right. The meetings I’ve been dipping into for children of alcoholics—at the urging of Tex—suggest I stay out of Mother’s orbit when she’s loaded. I started consulting Tex
when she and Harold took off on this tear a few months back. But rather than steer clear of her like they all say, I’m morbidly compelled to connect with her. Pray about it, those religious morons suggest, for they fancy some bearded giant staring down from a cloud is gonna zap me into shape. But a god I don’t believe in can’t wave a wand over my mother to stop her drinking. Or wipe away thirty years of fret that therapy has just tamped down.

Harold says I’m smoking hot, like a skillet, Mother says.

Lucky you, I say.

Y’all going out tonight? she wants to know.

Hardly, I said. Warren’s working on an essay. I’m ghostwriting an article about the stock market for that business review. I’m on deadline—huge pressure.

Actually, I’m not working on squat. I’ve been swilling chardonnay on the tiny porch—a back stair landing off our colonial—while headphones pump Mozart’s Requiem into my head over and over. However sorry for myself Mozart’s howling angels can make me, I want Mother to feel sorrier. This is part of our elaborate economy circa 1984. I send her money, and she lets me blame her for everything wrong with my life. She also intermittently berates me for becoming a corporate drudge. On the phone, she asks what we’re doing home on a Saturday night.

You’re both sticks-in-the-mud, she tells me. Or is it stick-in-the-muds?

We’re working, Mother. We’re not out drinking ourselves to death.

Don’t start on me, she says.

I was talking about Daddy, I say. But I hadn’t been talking about Daddy. I’d been trying to land a small barb through the thick fog around her.

Since you moved your daddy out, Mother says, I feel like a teenager again.

Is your blood pressure any better? I ask, hearing in the background the music from
Flashdance
start up.

I’m so fat, she says, I’m scared to take my damn blood pressure.

You’ve never been fat in your life, I say. I’ll bet he’s still wearing his poison ring. One of the ways my sister and I stay convinced that Harold’s gay is the hinged ring he carries valium in.

He wears those cheap ass gold chains—she raises her voice in Harold’s direction—
that’re turning his chest green
.

In the doorway across from me, Warren comes to mime hanging up the phone, and I raise my index finger to indicate I’ll be a sec. Why don’t I put the phone down? She’s ranting about the losers in the damn sobriety group Tex goes to. She says, His daddy told him I didn’t want him, which was a goddamn lie. Who does that to a baby? He might not have been an alcoholic without that.

I thought you and Harold were gonna go to some meetings with him? I say.

I went to one, and it was
I went here and got drunk, I went there and got drunk
.

In the background, I hear the blender whir as she adds, I’d sooner dip snuff.

Again, Warren appears in the door, holding up the empty bottle of wine with a puzzled look on his face. I jot down on a pad that I spilled the bottle.

Mother’s saying, I’m not an alcoholic, Mary. When you were little, I called the hotline that one time, and they showed up with a six-pack of beer because they assumed I’d be having the DTs. Without seizures, I didn’t make the team. They told me, You’re not an alcoholic, lady.

Eventually, I hang up to drink my own self into a stupor. And the next morning, when I ring Mother’s house to ensure she’s still got a pulse, I get no answer and no answer.

Calling Lecia next, I hear her ask am I sitting down. The question takes the bottom out of my stomach like a speed bump, and for the umpteenth time in my life, I feel the cold impact of Mother’s death. It’s so easy to picture her and Harold reeling down the road from Get Down Brown’s like they were in bumper cars.

She’s not dead, Lecia says. Dead would be simpler.

Lecia tells me that Harold allegedly propositioned some cowboy in the men’s room, and the guy had beaten the shit out of him. Which prompted Mother to draw—from her beaded bag—the pearl-handled revolver so small it could pass for a cigarette lighter. She held the cowboys at bay through the parking lot while she wrangled the pulp-faced Harold into her car.

Once home, Mother poured herself a glass of milk and opened a tranquilizing package of ho-hos. Then she proceeded to tear Harold a new asshole—verbally speaking. He was bloody-nosed already, and stout as a prize pig, blubbering Mother was his soul mate till he corked off on the kitchen floor.

Mother had sat on the counter stool, sipping at the milk and ratcheting up her pissed-off with every whisper sweep of the clock till it came to her Harold needed a piece of her mind. She’d pelted him with a pastry, then kicked him
not very hard
, she’d told Lecia, and mostly in his big fat ass.

Then she got her pistol out again and fired it over Harold’s head, and he’d screamed himself awake. Somewhere in there, he’d pissed his pants. She couldn’t shift him off the kitchen floor, so she called to Tex, who hauled Harold to detox.

She
shot
at him? I say.

That’s exactly what I said.
You shot at him?
Lecia says. So embarrassing.

Lecia’s our only family member plagued by a sense of propriety. She belongs to civic groups and the country club. She’d that morning taken from Mother’s house every gun she could rustle up. Do I know of any little pistols laying around? I don’t.

It’s like the old days, I say. Remember her shooting at Hector? (Lecia and I had draped ourselves over our stepfather’s semi-supine form while Mother brandished a firearm.)

Daddy, too.

When did she shoot at Daddy?

You were too little to remember. I know I told you about it. One Christmas. You never saw the bullet hole in the kitchen tile by the stove?

I thought Daddy was cleaning a pistol. Why’d she shoot at him?

The better question is, Lecia adds, why’d she shoot at anybody?

There was a pause, and we said in unison,
To get their attention
.

Which had been her standard explanation over the years.

I know a lot of people, Lecia says. I know a lot of people who’re drunks. I even know a lot of drunks with guns—and grudges. Our mother’s the only person I know ever shot at anybody.

It seems a nasty side effect of sleeping with her.

In fairness to her, Lecia says, she sounds contrite.

Maybe we could check her in the same place as Harold, I say. They could go in on the buddy system, like the navy.

Later, Tex calls to announce he’s shepherding Harold through the hospital’s recovery meetings, with Mother visiting every day (such loyalty makes me wonder if she makes her alleged weekly visits to Daddy in the home—though they no doubt barely register on him.) Tex can’t keep the bemusement out of his voice when he adds, You’ll never guess what she wound up doing this morning?

Going to one of those supportive-wives’ meetings?

Yes, ma’am.

Like a witch in church, I say.

Some lady put her off by talking about wiping her husband’s ass, and Mother claimed she got sick to her stomach. Anyway, Harold and I were in the meeting across the hall with all the drunks. Everybody laughing and raising hell. So she wound up crossing over.

She went to a meeting of sober drunks?

She did.

Will wonders never cease, I say. If this winds up taking, I owe you big.

She’s going to another meeting tonight.

You’re expecting too much, I say. She’s only there because he is—

Don’t be too sure, he says. They give out these white chips to anybody sober a day. Desire chip, it’s called. Looks like a poker chip. She raised her hand and stood up in front and got herself one. She raised her hand and said, I’m Charlie, and I’m an alcoholic.

Tomorrow she’ll wake up and say,
I’m Charlie, and I’m the fire chief
.

Tex says one of the lecturers at the detox was the very guy she’d called thirty years back, the guy who said she wasn’t sick enough to be an alcoholic.

I’d like to give that bastard a piece of my mind, I say.

But cynical as I try to sound about Mother’s stab at normalcy, I hang up to dial my sister, and together our tough talk gets thinner, the pauses in the conversation longer. We’re starting—reluctantly—to hope.

Afterward, I go into Warren’s study and lean on the door frame, saying, Mother’s getting sober.

He glances up, saying, I never thought she drank that much.

I gape at him, and he says, I know when you were little, she was bad.

Later, Mother calls, sounding chastened, and I scold her and hang up, for when she’s in no immediate danger of killing herself, I get to spill onto her the black bile I feel.

Eventually, I get drunk at her again, driving to the liquor store for a bottle of Jack Daniels like my poor old daddy used to drink (no scrap of awareness in the similarity), and I drink it in the garage while flipping through my wedding pictures, where Mother looks walleyed and very pleased with herself. I could drag her behind my car, I think. Instead, I drain the poison that I hope will kill her.

T
wo years after the wedding—five years after we met—Warren meets my invalid daddy on a summer day when the humid Texas air is saturated from the local oil refineries with a fluorocarbon stench that could peel paint. It’s their sole encounter.

I lead Warren into the urine-drenched air of Daddy’s nursing home with a bluster I don’t feel, hugging the nurses on duty as if we’re long lost sorority sisters. But inside, I’m ashiver with anxiety. For what? What could I expect to go right or wrong between two men with such gulfs between them and such silence inside them—Warren bred to it, Daddy broken to it.

Amid the other patients in the dayroom, Daddy is sitting with a thin pink blanket over his legs when we walk up. When he sees me, his face tries to brighten, but the dead half of it hangs down. He’s shaking his head with a stiff, persistent fraction of a smile. Truly, he’s a man split in half, neither fully dead nor fully alive.

His eyes are black as a crow’s, though, and they sparkle and go wet when he sees me.

Mur, he says, Murr.

That’s right, I say It’s Mary. I kiss his whiskery neck, asking does he want me to shave him before I leave.

But he doesn’t register the offer—a relief, since I whinge at inflicting the slightest razor nick.

His good hand grabs my left hand, grips it with the old iron he had in my youth. I stand next to him while Warren waits off to the side.

A little old lady in cat’s eye glasses with hair woven atop her head wheels up to me. She says, Are you his wife?

No, ma’am, I say, wondering if maybe Mother doesn’t visit as often as she’s told us, else this old bird was also too out of things to remember Mother.

His sweetheart?

No, ma’am, I say. I’m his daughter.

Thank goodness, she says. I’m his girlfriend.

Daddy lets go my hand a second and waves over toward the lady. She wheels to his other side, then puts her hand on one wheel of his chair protectively, saying, He buys me Cokes. He stays with me all day, so I never have to wonder where he’s at.

He’s good that way, I say.

He’s never lied to me, not once.

From the half of Daddy’s face I can see, his old smile is perfect. His eye glances off mine in cahoots. I can, for an instant, see him as he’d been all tall, kneeling down to me, saying,
Don’t tell your mama and sister. You and me’ll sneak off for a strawberry freeze
…

I start to move away, and he grasps my hand with a lobster grip. I wave Warren over. Daddy, I say, this is Warren.

Daddy glances at him.

Is that your sweetheart? the lady says.

Yes, ma’am.

Daddy studies my hand as if it were some codex that needed to be
deciphered somehow. He looks up at me, and from a great distance—tens of thousands of miles, decades—it’s as if he’s been fast-forwarded into our presence. Our glances click, and his claw of a hand clings to mine.
Murrr
, he said.

That’s right, Daddy.

He shakes his head and purses his lips. He looks around the room as if for help. The lady says, You’re making him mad, little lady. She pats his hand again. Honey, she says—honey, can I get you a Dr Pepper?

He half nods.

All right then, she says and wheels around.

My chiclet engagement ring’s still loose, only held on by the wedding ring I had fitted. Daddy wiggles the ring on my knuckle. He says,
Murrr…murr
.

Married, I finally say. I’m married. Yes, to Warren. He’s my husband. I reach for Warren and draw him over. For a second there, I hold each of their hands, standing like a conduit between them. I’m still looking only at the good half of Daddy’s face. He gives Warren the up and down scrutiny he’d bring to a horse prior to auction, then he glances back at me and rolls his eyes as if to say, jokingly,
This yahoo
.

Then he lets go my hand to shake Warren’s, and I take that in.

And that’s it, that instant. My life as I’ve shaped it includes—for that instant only—the daddy I once loved more than beans and rice. The lady wheels back with a Dr Pepper. I help her flip the tab, and she slides a bent straw into it.

We take turns buying, she tells me.

Daddy takes a sip and winks at her. Then he looks over at me, saying,
Looooo
.

I love you, too, Daddy, I say.

At the end of the visit, Warren calls him Mr. Karr and says he’s glad to meet him. And Daddy takes my hand in his and looks down at it and up at Warren. His eyes meet mine, and in a stiff nod, I get his last blessing, since within the year, we’ll come back to bury him.