Lit (31 page)

I step back out into the sunshine, saying to Lecia, Check out the tin ceiling.

She holds out her hand like a blind girl, and I take it. C’mon, I say, and though it’s rare for her to follow, she lets me tug her in. On this expedition only, I’m point woman. One hesitant step she takes, as if afraid to get too close to a cliff edge, then another, till she’s a few feet inside. She cants her wondering face up at the ceiling, then gasps, a hand covering her mouth. It’s not a small breath but the lung-deep, sucked-in huff you’d take, say, finding a rat running the baseboards of your kitchen.

Outside in the sunlight, I keep holding her hand. Though her eyes are devoid of feeling, fat tears stream down, and she curses me for dragging her to this godforsaken place—me with my fucking therapy and passion for the old crap. I didn’t know it’d be this hard, I tell her. Inside, I’m pissed at myself for buying her don’t-give-a-damn act when I knew better. I tell her it’s good we can face this place together, good that she got us out of here when she did.

Within the hour, I’m shepherding that vast chaise longue of a vehicle back toward the far side of the mountains, where she’s secured a thousand-dollar-per-night hotel room for us because there are no other rooms at any inns, and the sun can’t set on her in that town.

She grabs my hand in the car, palm to palm and tight, like we’re fixing to bound off the pool’s edge together.

Yes, she finally admits in the car, that was the place.

I recount to her how Mother told me she was surprised we didn’t have fun in the mountains. Lecia shakes her head.

The next day at the airport, she kisses my hair and holds my hand and says she loves the book and what a bang-up job I did, but she’s not
in her eyes anymore. When I look at her, I see her at age eleven. Months from now, once she gets the bound galley, she’ll read it and marvel that the opening works better with the scene of Mother at the fire, which is the exact same chapter she’d read in Colorado. The publisher set type from it, but she hadn’t remembered a damn thing from that first draft. Was I sure that was written in the version she saw? I was.

T
oby faces my mental block about not believing stuff from the Bible by pointing out that with my current spiritual construct, only stuff that happens to me firsthand counts as divine intervention. With total faith, I cling to the notion that God sent me—little Mary Karr, sinner deluxe—checks in the mail and healed my severely depressed head, got me car loans and a grant. I use the G-word now—God. I feel Him holding me when I’m scared—the invisible hands I mocked years before. But this same power couldn’t turn water into wine or—here’s the biggie—raise the dead, could it?

It’s kind of like, Toby says to me at his glossy dining room table one afternoon, not believing in Bob Dylan because you’ve only heard the CDs and never saw him in concert. (Again:
What is your source of information?
)

Based on my experience, I say, I am the center of the universe.

Lord help us, Toby says, pulling the corner of his mustache.

The magic stuff is what runs me off, I say. Sometimes I think of Jesus as some carnival trickster. Maybe the whole Resurrection was a scam. Like some televangelists saying,
Send me a dollar and put your hand on the TV screen and I’ll heal you
.

Toby tells me how being Christian during the Roman occupation was (as scams go) not so lucrative. The followers weren’t rich guys but riffraff—tax collectors and whores.

So let’s say Jesus was sincere. Maybe it’s the Church. Maybe Paul’s the big fakir.

You think Paul’s conversion made him some rich cult leader? That’s a laugh. He essentially resigned a CPA job to ride with the Hells Angels.

Early Christians, he tells me, partly won converts by going to death singing. I mean, a lion is eating your face and you’re singing. Or you’re crucified upside down and you’re singing. It’s undeniable that some experience changed them from the normal consciousness. Maybe they were hypnotized, brainwashed. Aren’t suicide bombers gleeful?

Hell, maybe I’ve gone nuts already, I tell him, though no small number of people—including mental health professionals—can attest that I’m saner and happier than before I went Navy SEAL on the spiritual front.

However much I balk at Christian miracles, I think friends manufacturing secular miracles—me included sometimes—is loonier. Like Deb thinks her wind chimes tinkling are messages from her dead ex-husband. You mean to tell me, I say to her on the phone, you don’t believe in the Resurrection but you think Richard controls the wind?

If Jesus isn’t (a) crazy, (b) a false prophet or con man or (c) his disciples weren’t, I have to at least consider the fourth possibility: that (d) some of those miracles had some foundation in fact. Somebody saw something remarkable.

Once you allow even that sliver of possibility, that crack of light, it’s not long before the stone rolls away from the tomb.

Right before Easter, as our church gears up to baptize and con
firm newcomers, I’m still—metaphorically speaking—staring down from the airplane door, wondering whether my parachute will open if I step out.

At one point Toby asks me, Why haven’t you taken communion at any of the churches you’ve visited when you travel? Those priests don’t know if you’re Catholic or not.

The idea shocks me, and I say so.

Why not? He has a mischievous grin on his face.

That would defile the Sacrament, insult the belief of all those people in church who’re committed to the faith.

So, he says, that is sacred to you?

It was, is.

In the end, no white light shines out from the wounds of Christ to bathe me in His glory. Faith is a choice like any other. If you’re picking a career or a husband—or deciding whether to have a baby—there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is—at the final hour—horse dookey. You can only try it out. Not choosing baptism would make me feel half-assed somehow, like a dilettante—scared to commit to praising a force I do feel is divine—a reluctance grown from pride or because the mysteries are too unfathomable.

In the back of a dark church on Holy Saturday, I sit between Dev and Toby. In the pews, everybody holds an unlit candle, and the priest comes in with the altar’s mega-candle. Stopping at the back row, he touches its taper to the charred filament on either side of the aisle. The flame’s passed one to another until we’re all holding fire in our hands.

Not long after, Walt calls after a longish silence. He’d been nursing Shirley through her long battle with cancer. And other than seeing them at their son’s wedding, I’d been in scant touch till her death. On the phone, I tell him how—in conference with an obstreperous
student—I was about to snap at the kid when it dawned on me that he was Huck Finn. See, I say on the phone, how I’m still channeling you?

How is finding Huck Finn in your office channeling me?

Don’t you remember telling me that unless you knew what was in my head, you couldn’t get Ernst Cassirer in there? Knowing the kid was Huck Finn let him be who he was with me.

I remember reading Cassirer with you.

And that little rat you took care of after she’d had her babies?

There were so many of them, he says.

I tell him how my students keep shape-shifting into characters from novels. A shy, disheveled farm kid was the young stable boy Wart about to pull a sword from a stone and become a king. A flushed sorority girl who hung a ball gown in a dry cleaner’s bag from my doorjamb while she spoke transformed into flushed young Kitty hoping to dance the mazurka in
Anna Karenina
.

You’re one of the big reasons I believe in God.

You see the irony, he say, for his father had been a minister, and he was a rationalist to his core.

You may be a godless fuck, I say, but—what was it your colleague said—
You give secular humanism a good name?

You give Christianity a good name, he says.

Walt’s strangely pleasant about my being a Catholic, though I get a snippy postcard from a novelist I know who says,
Not you on the pope’s team. Say it ain’t so
.

Only Jesus keeps eluding me. I can’t help noticing that all the Catholics I look up to seem very Christos-centered. But the crucifixion has started to rankle me.

At first, I’d liked the cross. You could never bring suffering there and look up and say,
Well, he didn’t have it bad as me
…. But after baptism, it starts to creep me out. My Episcopalian mother brags on the phone that she reveres the resurrected Christ. She likens my church to a butcher shop.

At least there’s a body on the cross, I say. There’s carnality there. Protestants have this Platonic—I don’t know—
idea
of a body. Too subtle for me.

One Sunday after church, the kids are playing in the basement corner, and I’m studying the mangled body of Jesus on a small icon when I say to Dev—now age nine—Why the crucifixion?

He’s fiddling with the knot in his shoe. What? he says. His interest in what I say is fast diminishing.

Why does redemption have to come through the crucifixion? I mean, why couldn’t you play hopscotch or win at solitaire?

He rolls his eyes and picks at the knot.

I’m thinking of my pal Nick Flynn, I say. He has a poem about somebody giving him Mass cards of Jesus with His heart on fire. It ends,
My version of hell/is someone ripping open his/shirt & saying,/ look what I did for you
.

That’s funny, Dev says. He puts his shoe up so I can get the knot loose. I’m picking at it when he says, Who’d pay attention to hopscotch?

Whaddya mean? I say.

He says, I mean, the crucifixion is like
Pulp Fiction
(the film Mother illicitly showed him years before). Nobody would pay any attention to some goofy song that got sung. Or if God just went
poof
over you. People get baptized all the time. It’s a big miracle to wash a person’s sins away. Nobody pays any attention at all to it.

That’s it! I say. It’s marketing. God reaches people by giving them the only kind of gory crap they’ll pay attention to.

But Dev has slipped off his other dress shoe and run in stocking feet to join his noisy pals in their game. The bull’s-eye he hits is original sin. We are a hard-to-sell people—so venal and nuts that we’ll crowd into the Coliseum, jubilant to see people hacked to death or devoured by beasts. Or we’ll sit drooling before comparably horrific TV images. Only a crucifixion is awful enough to compel public imagination.

Sitting there, I remember what Dev said to me after baptism:
We belong to a great big family
. However saccharine that sounds, it’s starting to seem true to me—on good days—not just in church, either. The way stick figures show our essential skeletons, so too each skeleton is a cross buried inside. Over time, it’ll come out to show who we’re actually kin to.

D
ev joins the last leg of my book tour down in Texas partly because Mother’s throttled the hometown librarian into hosting a book signing, which prospect niggles me. While I never set out to badmouth Leechfield or anybody in it, I sure didn’t sugarcoat its charms—an opinion locals were inured to. It’s not like they swanned past the oil refineries swatting mosquitoes and thinking,
Isn’t this place pretty as Paris?
Hell, they know why real estate goes so cheap. They live there.

That said, it does occur to both Lecia and me that some backwoods xenophobe might adjudge me a turncoat or carpetbagger and fancy drawing a bead on me.

We’re packing for Mother’s house when Lecia says, If I see the red laser light click on your forehead, I’ll throw my body in front of the bullet.

Neither of us can figure why Mother’s so gung ho about the whole public event, ceremony not being her forte, nor any form of pageant.
Birthday cakes were sporadic.
Let’s skip Christmas this year
was a standard executive edict starting when we were teenagers. (The only holiday where Mother really kicked ass was Easter. Something about ham and marshmallow peeps, the conscribed basket size, and the lower expectations inspired her—shiny geegaws in plastic eggs, macramé belts, a skateboard…. )

You’d also think Mother might shy from regaling the public with her psychotic break. But she’s proud as an Eagle Scout. When she announced to me by phone that her bridge club wanted to host a private potluck for all of us after the big event, I said, What have you done with my mother?

Oh, Mary, I was always like this.

She wasn’t, and that’s what Lecia and I bat about as we drive—our boys lolling in back—the three hours from her house on the Gulf to Leechfield.

All our lives down there, she was the turd in the punch bowl, Lecia gripes. Now she wants to prop us up in front of the bridge club like we’re pigs at the state fair.

What’s scariest, I say, is how excited I am that she’s excited.

By the time the book hit, Mother fit the Leechfield landscape. Neighbors who once kept their kids from playing in our yard now swap stories about her tantrums like baseball cards. There was the time she upended the oranges in the supermarket display, the fit she threw about parmesan cheese. She flipped off a motorcycle cop. A Baptist deacon who dared to scold her for wearing shorts in the yard heard that he could see evil in the crotch of a tree. Now church ladies holler
hey
in the afternoon. Mornings, old men jostle to buy Mother coffee at the grocery store.

Almost as worrisome is Lecia’s grim focus on a brisket Mother promised to fix. Whenever we drive home, Mother tempts Lecia with some childhood dish—chicken and dumplings, fudge, red beans and rice—but never, not once, follows through.

Lecia’s ongoing capacity to hope for these dishes just stumps me.
On the road before her, there’s a shimmering mirage of meat shredded in lush gravy with a side of buttery potato hunks. Does she bounce up and down a little in anticipation like a kid on a carousel? I believe she does, though the next instant, her face clouds. It won’t be there, will it? she says, shooting me a look.

There’s a newspaper cartoon of a bucket-headed boy repeatedly talked into running at the football held by a wicked pigtailed girl who yanks it away so the boy falls on his ass every time.

How many times, Lecia says, am I going to run at that football?

Many, it turns out. With scads of costly professional help, I gave up pining for maternal behavior long ago. But Lecia had once hired Mother to pick up her son Case at kindergarten until—a few weeks in—Mother forgot the boy in the parking lot. Given fat sums to answer Lecia’s insurance office phones, Mother tended to snipe into the receiver
What?
The way Stalin trusted Hitler not to invade Russia, Lecia trusts Mother. In a way, I admire the simple persistence of both parties—Lecia’s overfunctioning, Mother’s under.

On any given holiday, Mother sits on her spreading white ass on either porch glider or couch. Which idleness—in some perverse way—I also envy. It takes fortitude to station yourself immobile before the classic-movie channel for days at a pop while hordes of individuals bake and whip, sauté and sear; serve and clear; and eventually scrub cheese crusts off casseroles and pan drippings from a blackened oven.

For weeks I’ve hounded Mother daily about brisket, and she’s sworn to ante up. But yesterday her corns hurt, and as late as dawn this morning, the meat hadn’t been bought. She was having palpitations, but I swore if the stove was cold when we walked in, I’d head back to the airport.

It could kill me to go to the store with my heart fluttering this way, she said.

If you drop dead making this brisket, I said, you’ll go straight up to live with Baby Jesus.

I’m thinking of going back to being a Buddhist, she said.

Then you’ll escape the wheel of rebirth, I said.

Minutes after we pull in, my sister’s face floats cherublike above an electric skillet holding a mess of peppery brisket. She uses her hand to wave toward her nose the white ribbons of steam swiveling up. Mother breathes frost on her big square glasses, then wipes them. She looks stunned we’re making such a big deal.

Oh, she says with a distracted look, I forgot to get the blow-up mattress. (Lecia and I sent her—separately, it turns out—cash to buy an extra mattress.)

My sister’s deaf to this. She’s forking up saucy meat with a beatific expression. Such a token might not exactly undo past hurts, but they might reshape our mouths to savor what’s now being served up.

That night, at opposite ends of the bulbous sofa, Lecia and I have lain our respective heads like characters in a storybook rowboat under tinfoil stars, with a faded blue quilt covering our middles. In the saggy double bed we used to share, our boys have sacked out—Dev blond like her, Case dark like me.

At the schoolyard basketball court today, we’d watched Dev drag in Case’s wake as I had Lecia’s. Just thirteen, Case can just barely palm the ball for a second or two, his hand like a giant spider holding it aloft as Dev gapes. Ready? Case said, and he bounce-passed it to the smaller boy.

Dev two-stepped through a layup, the orange ball slipping through the white net, which prompted Case to shout out
swish
. Leaping for the rebound, Case stepped back and started to lecture, detailing proper form for a shot with the rigor of a ballet master. Bend your knees. Hold it here. Finish with the tips of your fingers right over the front rim.

That night on Mother’s sofa, Lecia asks, Who does Case remind you of?

In terms of the need to expound? You and Daddy, I say.

Frightening, she says.

About then Mother stumps in, hair every which way, a piece of cheese disappearing into her maw. She says, What’re y’all talking about so late?

Our deep and abiding love for you, Lecia says.

Mother slumps down on the facing chair, staring at the grassy shag carpet. When she lifts her head, there are tears in her eyes. I wish your daddy was here for this, she says, us all together this way.

Look at both those boys, Lecia says, Pete Karr times two.

He’s the only person who ever really loved me.

What are we? I say.

Mother shrugs. The only man, I mean. I miss him like crazy.

He did adore you, I say.

He felt sorry for me, she says, but he stood by, thick or thin.

She runs a hand over her spiky hair, asking, Does this haircut look like feathers?

In the library the next day, Mother’s bridge club marches in—a troop of ladies bearing into the small room trays of baked goods big as coffee tables.

The day unfolds like that old TV show
This Is Your Life
, where producers conspire to drag before you the past’s every character. In aging form, they parade. There’s the doctor who examined me the night Mother went to the hospital; my first-grade teacher; the principal who told me I’d be no more than a common prostitute. John Cleary, the first boy I ever kissed, is there with his daughters. My friend Clarice from grade school, Meredith from high school (in lawyer’s garb and big as a linebacker), Doonie with his whole tribe. There’s the judge Mother charmed into freeing me from jail—nearly a hundred, he is, his liver-spotted hand still clutching Mother’s, and he still gazes at her like she’s a jam-stuffed biscuit. The druggist, the guy who ran the lumberyard, girls who snubbed me at the skating rink, girls who didn’t.

I feel every school photo I ever took pass over my face to melt into the forty-year-old I am now. Seen by so many pairs of old eyes, I become my every self.

Then above the crowd, a disembodied head comes gliding as if carried on a pole. From the corner of my eye, I catch the silhouette, and my head whips to track it. The profile vanishes behind a pillar. The room around me clicks off as the face eases back into view—black-haired with snow at the temples. I stand so fast, the chair I’m in tips over. The crowd parts, and the eras collapse into each other. All the notches on the time line are stripped off like thorns. It’s Daddy approaching me like a smiling phantom.

Though it’s not Daddy, of course, but my cousin Thomas, unseen since our grandpa’s funeral in sixth grade, wearing the exact face Daddy had at fifty, and Lecia must think so, too, since she’s rushed to his side, hand over her mouth.

Maybe that day’s bounty bumped my sales up, plus Lecia’s inflicting copies on virtually everybody she knew—clients, friends, cleaning people. Out of the trunk of her car, she hawks them like a hot dog vendor (I swear), and being as she could sell snow to an Eskimo, she reorders often. In any bookstore, she remerchandises so that my book’s in front.

So the book was a sleeper hit, which floored me. Before it came out, I’d actually warned the publisher not to print so many, since the thought of them growing cobwebs in warehouses flooded me with dread. Having spent my fifteen-year career reading to a few loyal pals, I was shocked to find that now bookstore crowds wrapped around the block as I signed till my hand cramped. Mail flooded in. Magazines would pay me astonishing sums to write a few thousand words. Lecia and Mother were wild with glee, my sister joking that I’d never have to call collect again.

But in another way, nothing much changed. A single mom can’t hit the road and stay gone. Mostly I lived like before. I taught. I stood around a Little League field with a clipboard and a whistle around my
neck. Maybe once a week, some mom might say she’d seen me in
People
magazine. Then once or twice a month I’d make a surreal overnight trip where I felt—as writer Ian McEwan once said—like an employee of my former self.

The big win? Money. My bills were paid. I could hire a student to help with Dev, grocery shop, fold laundry. Other than that and some journalism jobs—and the monthly photo session or far flung reading or lecture—I was a single mom in a small town.

Which is how I wind up in a sweltering theme park come August—by selling books. Before I went on the road, I promised Dev if we made it on one big best-seller list, I’d take him to Disney World. For a week: my idea of an electric chair with no off switch.

Still, being there turned out to be a thrill, but for one hair-raising ride called the Tower of Terror, where they dropped us in an elevator a dozen floors. In the group photo, everyone’s hands are up in the air as they grin. I’m hunkered down as if for a bomb blast. (I have too many frames per second for Tower of Terror.)

After five days of more palatable rides, Dev and I abandon the blistering park, so I can rent a speedboat we can’t afford. With his new blue captain’s hat on, he steers us bouncing over the waves.

At night, while he soaks in the bathtub, I talk to Walt for way longer than I promised his kids I would. He’s suffering some asbestos-related disease caught in a car factory as a teenager. Now it’s devouring the lungs in his barrel chest, and every breath costs him.

In St. Paul the year before, I’d visited him. His daughter Pam had moved home, and he’d needed an oxygen bottle.

From Florida that night, I ask what can they do.

Not much, he says, panting. Morphine. It’s progressive.

You’re telling me you’re gonna die?

That’s right.

You can’t die, I say. That’s just unacceptable to me.

Well, I’m not a big fan of the idea, either. He wheezes for a minute before saying, I can’t talk. Tell me your adventures.

So I tell him about the long drop in the tower; and the wonton soup at Epcot; and Tinker Bell sliding down on her cable through fireworks; and a baby bird we found under a park bench, fallen from a nest, how it looked like a purplish dragon, how we sat with it till a guy with a broom swept it into his dustpan.

Great job, he gasps. You’ve done.

The line between us is crackling, and I know I’m keeping him on the line for myself. His breath comes in like a tide and goes out farther every time.

Tell me some noble deaths, he says.

I remind him that when Socrates had drunk the hemlock—in the
Phaedo
we read together—the cold was creeping up his legs, how his students bent over him, saying,
Don’t you have anything more to tell us
…. And in the Chekhov biography I just finished, he was coughing into his napkin bright red arterial blood, and once the doctor announced it was hopeless, champagne was called for.

Dev comes out wrapped in an oversize bathrobe, and he’s got that crease in his forehead that comes when he sees me cry. He knows Walt’s fading, and his hand settles on my shoulder.

Remember back when I was in school, I finally say into the putty-colored receiver, how you bought all those lunches and theater tickets for me, when I asked how I’d ever pay you back? Remember what you said?

He’s too breathless to respond.

You said,
It’s not that linear. You’re gonna go on to help somebody else
. Well, I got a chance to help my assistant out of a pinch. And she asked how she’d pay me back, and I told her the story. I’d never have done that without you.

He’s struggling to say something, barely audible his voice is, a plume of air, the smoke trail a voice leaves behind. He says, Tell her to thank me.