Lit (9 page)

I lie there pondering his fiscal prickliness, wholly mysterious to me. Back home, nobody had any money, so we swapped the same few bucks back and forth with open hands. (Those without money don’t grasp right off having to discipline yourself against sycophants.)

Listening to his even breath, I sense the oppressive weight of my old self inside me pressing to run wild again. My old mother I’m trying to keep in. Snow pecks at the window screens.

And then the sound of our upstairs neighbor playing the ukelele—
plunka plunka plunka
. There is no instrument goofier nor more insidious. The guy can play for hours, and while I can sack out during a train wreck, Warren heaves over and swears. He reaches his arm out and flips on the white noise machine that blocks all sound. It makes a cocoon of rushing noise meant to mimic an air conditioner or waterfall. To me, it sounds like the sucking of a dentist’s drain. Warren needs absolute silence, absolute dark to sleep, and with the entire racket in my head, I know myself to be an inadvertent force for pandemonium.

For a long time, I lie studying in the blue dark Warren’s angled jaw and ski-slope cheekbones. It’s shallow, I confess, but the architecture of his face never fails to transfix me. It’s the kind of face people on the street invariably asked for directions—the face of the army officer, the team captain, the star professor.

Without Warren’s hands cupping my own face, I’m almost faceless. I need his body in bed and his books on my shelves anchoring me to the planet. I need him ahead of me to complete a two-mile run, else I give up and light a smoke. I need his editing skills. When he draws his pen through clunky lines, I cut them. I need his unbudgeable integrity. I mean, when a big-deal magazine requested changing some of his poems, he pulled them rather than compromise. I’d have typed mine backward in Urdu to see them into print.

Underneath the worries with Warren and money and how to live runs a humming current of hurt—Daddy lying wordless, eyes cloudy. They said he wouldn’t live off the respirator, but it’s over a year now. He’s being calcified, his empty shape pressed into the sheets like a fern in lava. Ask him if he wants more juice, and he might shout out,
Bacon!
Part of me believes I should catch the next bus down there to start spoon-feeding him—that’s my fantasy—a daughterly sacrifice I lack the maturity to pull off, for my patience with bedpans and bent straws rarely lasts an hour. Carrying the warm jar of piss his catheter linked him to, even the short distance to the caged hospital bed set up in my girlhood room, felt like bearing death itself.

Lying alongside Warren that night, I again resolve to generate income, really get serious about it, to chip in on Daddy’s nursing and still meet school loans, without ever pestering Warren again, lest that gap between our backgrounds yawn open. Money can finalize my change, I tell myself. Also, I have to never, never, never drink hard stuff. Long as I stick to beer or wine, I’ll be fine.

In the morning, when Warren stirs, I’ve already gone to the bank. The mug of coffee I bring him has a twenty-dollar bill rubber-banded to the handle.

If we talked about the night before, I don’t recall it, which isn’t fair to either of us, for it doesn’t show our reasoned selves paring away at our scared ones. But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

Not long after, though, some of his doubts about me leak out again, and again the topic’s a disparity in how we want to live. We’ve jogged five miles around Fresh Pond and are stretching out when he says, You know what my sister noticed about you first?

I cling to the fence and am bending my knee to loosen the quad, wheezing out, My rapier wit?

Warren’s quick smile skids past my joke. He says, That you had really nice luggage. She warned me that a girl with such fancy luggage might expect to live higher on the hog than a poet would.

The irony? It had been Lecia’s Hartmann luggage from the Rice Baron before they’d divorced—borrowed so as not to be embarrassed bringing an army duffel bag to his parents’ house.

A week or so later, we unwrap our brown-papered Christmas gifts decorated with crayons and string—homemade gifts all. I’d stitched up a giant pillow to serve as a faux headboard, stars on a background of deep blue. He’ll spend Christmas with his family, because otherwise he’d never see his far-flung siblings. To me their cool exchanges mirror chatter at a bus stop. My pending visit to Daddy is an event on a par with cyanide.

Warren stretches his legs in front of the red leather club chair appropriated from his parents’ attic. He picks at a moist banana muffin I’d made from scratch—black bananas being cheapest. I unwrap the small packet of audio tapes he made me—recordings of some lost lectures on the epic by an unknown prof.

Some girls pine for jewelry, but for me the tapes are like an invitation into Warren’s monastery, since his devotion to poetry has a monkish quality. I’d spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet—buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture—than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

I slide the cassette into the tape deck and press play. The old recording is scratchy enough to conjure a time before we were born. The professor’s first sentence brings me up short, for it sketches a football field-sized hole in my reading. He notes there’s as much distance between Homer and Virgil as between Chaucer and us.

I press stop, saying, Isn’t that like a thousand years?

Around that, Warren says. He peels the paper from the muffin.

Since grad school, I’d felt as stuffed full of knowledge as a Christmas goose. Suddenly, a thousand unknown years of poetic history yawns unstudied before me. How little I know panics me.

I say, I’d always figured those toga-wearing guys hung out around the same time.

His smile is soft. You always know what poets wore.

I say something like, Baudelaire tweezed his nose hairs and wore the floppy black satin bow. Dickinson wore white like a virgin bride. Warren Whitbread wore Brooks Brothers shirts, button-down, oxford-cloth. Jeans and khakis. He was long of limb and lean in a blue bathrobe.

He says, And Mary Karr?

Black black black. Plus loads of mascara. Spike heels.

He reaches among the wrappings on the floor and holds up the eye-fryingly pink sweater his mother picked up for me in Bermuda, saying, You’re not ready for this yet?

Grotesque as it looks, in some ways, I want nothing more than to look right occupying it.

C
ome January, as part of clawing my way into the white-collar classes I mock, I sit behind the receptionist’s desk of a telecommunications firm that helped build and maintain the internet. In this age, faxes are big news. Operators still plug callers in and out of switchboards. Crawling with horn-rimmed MIT geniuses, this place is, and they’re marketing (unsuccessfully if you can believe it) the very first e-mail program. They’re almost growing too fast not to hire me, so soon I move up from receptionist ($12K) to a secretarial job I suck at ($13K). Since I need the overtime, I take up nighttime data entry for accounting.

It’s staring into one of those green screens, doing corporate budgets, that I notice how high salaries rise in marketing. Also, they spend hundreds of thousands on trade shows each year, and my product-manager girlfriend informs me that nobody pays attention to the bud
gets. So in the company library, I read a bunch of trade magazines and essentially retype what they said needs to happen into a proposal for managing that budget. Poof, I’m a marketeer.

Riding the six-thirty bus to the company in my cheap suit with my briefcase on my lap, I can pass for a normal citizen—except for scribbling poetry in a black notebook. I never thought of myself as competent in commerce, particularly, and striding through the doors lends me a new bearing. I join a corporate women’s track team, lured by the sweet prospect of fitting in as we lope around the pond at lunch hour. Me, belonging somewhere. Sliding the company credit card across a hotel desk, I radiate bourgeois integrity. For a girl bred to yank peanuts out of the ground, any desk job gives off an urban sheen. And this is the go-go eighties in a company where they slap up new cubicles every week.

Meanwhile, Warren’s volunteer library job has morphed into a full-time assistant curator’s position, so we’ve moved to a tree-lined suburb where the noise quotient disturbs his work and sleep less. Financially, I’m not exactly out of the woods, but with the first health insurance I’ve ever had, I track down a therapist. Night terrors still wake me screaming twice a week, and if I have a few drinks, an image of Daddy warping into fossil form can set me on a crying jag.

Every month we scrape together enough to eat out at a cheap fish house—mussels in garlic and white wine. Once, at the next table, a similarly steaming bowl is lowered in front of a Polish Nobel laureate in poetry whose public lectures we’ve been religiously going to, all goggle-eyed. We marvel at his high forehead, like that bust of Beethoven you always see.

Don’t stare, Warren says.

But I can’t stop looking at this laureate’s gray and diabolical eyebrows, projecting above his light eyes like a ram’s horns. He practically speeds up my heart.

Do tree surgeons gape at great examples of tree surgery? Do line cooks get misty eyed seeing a well run café pump out orders? For
me seeing this guy gives an almost sexual thrill—like a horny teenager faced with a centerfold. Or more like a devout altar girl seeing a saint.

Please don’t, Warren finally says in a voice barely audible. He places an empty purple shell in the bowl between us.

What? I say.

Don’t introduce yourself, he says. Admit you’re thinking about it.

It’s true that my former grad school professor Bob translates the guy at Berkeley, so we connect at some small nexus.

Warren and I both pick at our mussels till I say, Why not? It’s something I can tell our grandkids about. I touched the hand that wrote those words.

I don’t want to be here for it, Warren says. He raises a finger for the check. Behind his napkin, he says, You don’t have to meet every famous poet.

In his view, my appetite for social activity is voracious. I remember seeing an invitation to his college reunion on the kitchen table that year. The choices were:

He circled the words to read
I hope I cannot attend
before sending it back.

You’re at Harvard every day, I say. You record Seamus Heaney lectures (Harvard’s own Nobel-anointed poet). He was your teacher, even. You host poetry readings twice a month.

The Greek waiter drops off the check, and I rifle my briefcase as Warren goes over the math. He says, Seamus is plagued by toadies. I don’t want to be one of them.

I snatch the check from his hand, saying, I’m the boring stiff in a suit who comes in late to the reading and nobody talks to at the reception. I live in a business gulag.

He says, Nobody thinks of you as a wallflower, Mare.

I glance over at the Polish luminary, adding, I just want to shake his hand.

Warren looks as if he’d like to sink through the floor, so I say, Go ahead. I’ll meet you at the car.

As he slips on his coat, I say, Not speaking to Seamus is not treating him like a normal person, you know.

He pulls on his stocking cap with a grimace.

Seconds later, I shake the great laureate’s hand, and it shames me to say I’m so desperate to enter the world in which he’s lord that I get a shock of electricity doing so.

We’re driving home when Warren says, You’d sit in his lap if he’d let you.

He’s eighty, I say. I just wanted to touch him and see if he was real.

Cambridge can make history come alive to you with its parade of big-deal writers. At MIT, we see blind Borges right before he dies. And if we bicker over our social differences, still a steady current of book talk flows back and forth.

Through Warren’s library job, I visit the special collections, and together we bend over the silver reliquary a pope once wore that holds a lock of John Keats’s hair. Next to my face, breathing frost on the glass, Warren’s mouth whispers a sonnet. Together we read Keats’s letters to his lost beloved about how the stitches on a cap she made him went through him like a spear. I lace my fingers with his. The average non-poetry devotee may think the intensity around this stuff off-kilter at the least, but for us, it’s like digging our hands together into a secret vat of pearls. In that realm only we are rich as any royalty.

W
eddings had ahold of Mother—not in a good way, not in the girlish way of ordering orange blossoms and trawling for china patterns. She’s more like the old Vietnam vet who—seeing the ceiling fan whir—throws himself on the floor to scream
Incoming!
Any ceremonial assemblage of families tends to set Mother off.

On the occasion of Lecia’s—at a justice of the peace in El Paso—Mother got walleyed drunk and cussed out her rice-farming son-in-law, calling him an ignorant Republican hillbilly. She’d also torn up the only Polaroids of the event, at which point Lecia and I blackmailed her into temporarily giving up the sauce by threatening never to see her again.

Lecia’s marriage to the Rice Baron didn’t last—her divorce coincided with my engagement—but our uproar with Mother bought us several heavily medicated years in which she moped around the house, occasionally threatening suicide. What did I want for her then? Good cable and some downers—in other words, to keep her quiet so she didn’t incinerate anything. In a poem of mine, I noted that she aimed the channel changer like a wrist rocket at the last reality she could alter.

The occasion for her falling off the wagon is the afternoon of my rehearsal dinner at the Ritz in Boston, where my father-in-law-to-be had kept a tab since law school. To make us appear even more fractious, Lecia is living like a squatter in two rooms behind her insurance office with her toddler son and the Salvadoran couple who left the Rice Baron’s employ to help raise the boy.

Before the rehearsal dinner, I’m lying in a shampoo chair with my head in the black sink, neck arched upward in a perfect position to have my throat cut, and I catch a distant whiff of marijuana.

Mother
, I think. With that single word, an unease comes shimmering into my solar plexus.

My stylist, Richard, who’s been vigorously scrubbing my scalp, twists my soapy hair into a unicorn horn, saying, Maybe you should wear it like this down the aisle.

I interrupt him, rising up. Do you smell that? I say.

What? he says.

Pot, I say.

Lifting his nose in the air, he gives a stuffed-up snuffle, then says, Allergies.

It’s dusk, and I’ve warned Richard and his beautician colleague Curtis in advance not to offer Mother and me their usual convivial glass of wine. Twice.

Reluctantly, I lie back down, but some engine of vigilance has been kick-started in my middle, and it’s starting to rumble. I say, Curtis wouldn’t give her marijuana.

Curtis can’t
afford
marijuana, Richard says, adding, It’s probably floating up from the alley.

And with that, I tell him how—visiting me once at college—Mother got gunched out of her brains with my pals. In my twenties, she sat in on a poetry workshop with Etheridge, and afterward, I found her on his back step sharing a blunt with him and a bunch of young brothers. Which embarrassed me at the time, since she flirted like a saloon floozy, but also since her lack of maternal posture always unconsciously felt like some failure of mine on the child front.

By the end of the Mother stories, Richard’s finger-combing through the suds in my hair with warm water has sent an ease from the scalp down my spine and along my limbs.

She’s in good hands with Curtis, Richard says. He’s wrapped my hair in a towel, and I sit upright.

And there’s nobody else here?

We closed the shop for you two. Very exclusive, Richard says, adding, we have caught kids getting high in the alley before.

Not long after, Curtis swans in, giving off an odor of patchouli oil as he rifles a drawer. He says, Your mom’s a riot. I’m gonna visit her in Texas. She knows a place I can buy ostrich-skin cowboy boots.

I’m sure she does, I say.

Some time later, when Curtis presents her, I see he’s jacked her hair up into a concoction only a drag queen could relish. Her eyes are glassy, and her neck has that bobblehead swivel.

Mother! I say.

Don’t I look precious? she says, hands on her hips.

You look high!

Do you think? Curtis says. She made me do it that high.

Mother tips her head coquettishly, which, with the giant hairdo, has the effect of a topiary starting to topple over. She says, We smoked a little maryjane.

Then we’re in Warren’s tiny backseat. As he navigates the river road traffic to the Ritz, I’m violently trying to de-escalate her hair.

Why now, Mother? I say, almost in tears. Why’d you have to start now?

Ow, she says. She’s holding her ears as I tug. Don’t ruin your mascara.

You reek of marijuana, I say.

The city of Cambridge is sliding away behind us. At the boathouse, we pass somebody hauling a lone scull from the water.

I apologize to Warren as I work at the vast rats’ nest of her head.

I don’t smell anything, he says. With Warren, you can never know if this is impeccable denial or politeness. Maybe at all those heavy-drinking WASP country club events, he’d learned to ignore the average soused-up human.

I stop yanking at her hair and notice the buildings of Harvard—carved from various fine types of stone—slipping by like a kingdom I’d never gain the keys to. The whole city is so profoundly Caucasian. One of the city’s signature food items is a slablike whitefish devoid of the southern paprika and varicolored peppers that might make such a thing edible. Even its basketball team is thick with knobby-jointed midwestern farm boys whose pasty torsos evoke the aforementioned fish.

Nobody ever wants me to have any fun. What’s the big deal? Ow, she says.

This is payback for all those Tonette permanents you scalded my ears off with.

Mother tries to catch Warren’s eyes in the rearview, saying, Warren, you’ve gotta come to Texas and see the pictures, of your wife. Do you think I look bad?

You got in the back so quick I couldn’t see you, he says. His eyes are fixed on the lights of Boston.

Master of diplomacy, I say. A compliment, this is, since—without
such detachment—I still get whiplash from my own family’s turbulence.

Warren, can you hand me my purse? she says. I’ll find the Shalimar.

Can we stop and buy some Visine? I say. And some mouthwash, maybe?

It’ll make us late, he says.

And I need some cigarettes, Mother says, rummaging through her purse. She stops suddenly and looks at me. She touches her mother’s cameo at my neck, saying, I’d like to paint you like this.

The road’s lights steamroll over us.

I can see the sweat break out on Warren’s temples as I beg him to stop, though he hates being late. I’ve mostly tamped down Mother’s ash-white hair, and I’m using my fingers to comb through its natural waves, saying, You do have the best cheekbones, Mother.

I can’t tell if there are tears in her eyes or she’s just high as she says, I don’t want to go if I’m gonna embarrass you.

Warren pulls up outside a bodega and leaves us in the puffing car. Seeing his runner’s form in the unfamiliar structure of a suit brings a surge of ardor. Soon as he’s out of sight, Mother says, Harold and I share a glass of wine every now and then, when we go out dancing—Harold being the somewhat prissy young man of color hired to help care for Daddy.

This gives me a sick feeling in my chest. I look toward the door Warren disappeared through, his presence an antivenin to the snakebite of Mother’s disarray. Our family’s so inadequately small compared to the profligate Whitbreads. My own daddy’s so out of things, he probably doesn’t actually know I’m getting married.

Inside, I keep trying to squash down the image of my blear-eyed daddy, since a buried part of me longs for him to be reborn all tall and sober, to loop my arm in his, to wrap my hand on his biceps, then squire me to Warren’s side. A father walks his daughter down the aisle.
Such a wholly unoriginal wish could dismantle me if I permit myself to dip into it. In my head, I shoo it off like an insect.

Warren gets back in the car, handing me a small paper bag over his shoulder. I fish through it for the eyedrops. Mother has her Shalimar out and is studying the cap for where the nozzle is. I tell her, They’ll be unfailingly polite. They always are.

She squirts behind her ear, and the scent of rose attar touches some reptilian area of my brain, where lies whatever faint recollection of beauty I have.

Warren, she says, you know what they say a mother-in-law’s job is at a wedding?

I don’t, he says, pushing his glasses up his nose.

Just shut up and wear beige.

He actually snorts at the prospect.

Mother takes my hand in her scented one. My heart was thumping so bad in my chest. I was scared to take another valium in case there was a toast or something because I’d fall into my plate.

I take no comfort in sharing anxiety with my once towering, powerful mother, for any ways we favor each other feel distinctly un-bridal. I show her my throat, adding, Make me smell like you. Then we draw up into the gilded light of the Ritz, and the doorman helps me out.

We enter the paneled bar to find the Whitbreads plural—six siblings, two daughters-in-law, one son-in-law—scattered among the low tables. Taken together, they’re the tallest people in the room, and possibly the best looking. My chic sister and her lawyer boyfriend have been chatting equably with them over drinks when we bluster in. There’s the hubbub of shaken hands, and I can see Mother’s turned out nice and smiling. The martini that lands before me gets tossed down.

Drinking to handle the angst of Mother’s drinking—caused by her own angst—means our twin dipsomanias face off like a pair of
mirrors, one generation offloading misery to the other through dwindling generations, back through history to when humans first fermented grapes.

The next thing I know, Lecia’s grabbing my arm as we stride up the stairs to the table, saying, What is she on? Then we’re seated at enormous tables draped with enough linen to clothe a convent.

Sometime after the first course, Warren turns to me, asking if we can speak privately in the foyer. I rise on numb legs. The pre-wedding joke Lecia kept nudging me with was this: Soon as the Whitbreads met Mother, the wedding would be off. From across the room, my sister’s eyes lock on mine, brows raised. I shrug at her, and her napkin seems to wipe off her own smile.

Walking behind Warren, I’m approaching execution, till he stops and draws from his breast pocket a small blue velvet box. It holds a platinum ring with a sapphire the size of a chiclet flanked by diamonds of equal size, which—with all the drinks in me—makes me wobble. He slides it onto my shaking finger, saying, They’re family stones. Mother had it made. I joke I’ll need a bodyguard to wear it in public. When I lean back to stare into his green eyes, I resist the urge to kiss him—a public display he’d hate. But our gazes are so interwoven, I feel neither Texas trash nor WASP-itude can touch us.

It doesn’t matter that my mother-in-law sobs through much of the meal, not—I’m guessing—from joy. Warren’s brother Dev says with genuine puzzlement as we head down the grand staircase,
She was crying?
And I think How do they block this stuff out? Nor does it matter that Mother offered to paint Mr. Whitbread in the nude and quote
fix anything you need fixed
close quote.

The next day, at the inn we took over for the wedding, I swallow enough expensive champagne to float me effortlessly to the altar, toward the only lover I’ve ever both adored and admired. Around us, the green lawns of New England spread away into a fresh geography. War
ren slides my mother’s mother’s rose gold band on my finger next to the blinding platinum and jewels from his, and it’s a transforming sensation. The ties of both our families unloose us. We are, by my measure, free of them all, our disparate homesteads. Our small family circle will be impenetrable.