The Liars' Club: A Memoir (16 page)

Remarkably enough, the hurricane didn’t go in at Leechfield,
this despite the fact that a tidal wave had been dead set on a course that would have squashed every remaining citizen flat as a roach. The odds on a direct hit had been high. But the storm took a weird turn, the kind of dodge people later likened to a fast quarterback barely scooting around some bullnecked lineman. The move was a forty-to-one fluke. Just before Carla came ashore at Leechfield, the storm stopped almost dead in place; then it made a sixty-degree turn. Only the edges swept over East Texas, the rest flying full force into Cameron, Louisiana, which hadn’t battened down at all.

Cameron’s preparations wouldn’t have mattered much, though, since a good hunk of the Gulf of Mexico essentially lifted itself up and then toppled over right on the low-lying town. People shinnied up trees, trying to get away from the rising water. Civil Defense did what they could at the last minute, and some families managed to outrun the flood in their cars when the radio announced where the storm was heading in. But a lot of people didn’t happen to have their radios turned on. Casualties were high. The TV ran footage of guys in hip waders sloshing through their own living rooms, feeling around underwater for pieces of furniture that hadn’t washed away.

The storm also flooded the bayous and brought all manner of critters from both salt and fresh water right into buildings and houses. When the water went down, one guy I read about in the paper found an eight-foot nurse shark flopping on his kitchen tiles. Whole bunches of people opened dresser drawers to find cottonmouths nesting next to their balled-up socks. There were also nutria-rat bites, kids mostly, toddlers who got cornered in their own yards. The rats were as big as raccoons and had front teeth shaped like chisels with bright orange enamel on them, which made the attacks particularly scary to think about. Neighbors came back to town bringing stories about cousins or friends of friends who’d been bitten, then gone through the agonizing rabies shots in the belly. I was a vulture for this kind of story.

Grandma died during all this, of course. It turned out that she hadn’t been fully dead at Auntie’s, just in a coma. I’ve been told
that she actually came out of that coma and spent a few days bedridden back at our house in Leechfield before she died. I don’t remember it that way. Apparently I just blanked out her last visit along with a lot of other things. She died, and I wasn’t sorry.

The afternoon it happened, Frank Doleman came to the door of my second-grade class with Lecia in tow. Mrs. Hess told me to get my lunch box and galoshes. Out in the hall, Lecia was snubbing into a brown paper towel that covered half her face so I couldn’t see if she was ginning out real tears or just making snotty sounds in her head. Uncle Frank kneeled down eye-level to tell me that Grandma had “passed away.” I remember this phrase seemed an unnaturally polite way of putting it, like something you’d hear on
Bonanza.
All the local terms for dying started more or less coursing through my head right then.
She bought the farm, bit the big one, cashed in her chips
, and my favorite:
she opened herself up a worm farm.
(I had the smug pleasure once of using this term up north and having a puzzled young banker-to-be then ask me if these worm farmers in Texas sold worms for fishing, or what.)

I sat in the back of Uncle Frank’s white convertible going home with Lecia blubbering nonstop in the front bucket seat and him putting his hammy hand on her shoulder every now and then, telling her it was okay, to just cry it out. What was running through my head, though, was that song the Munchkins sing when Dorothy’s house lands on the witch with the stripy socks: “Ding dong, the witch is dead.” I knew better than to hum it out loud, of course, particularly with Lecia making such a good show, but that’s what I thought.

Daddy was squatting on the porch in his blue overalls and hard hat, smoking, when we pulled up. He’d obviously been called right out of the field. He was dirty and smelled like crude oil when he hugged Lecia and me, one under each arm. Our principal didn’t pause, though, before shaking his hand, didn’t even dig out his hankie to wipe the oil off his palm after he shook. He was partial to white starched shirts, but knew when to set that aside.

While Uncle Frank backed out, Daddy and Lecia and I stood together a minute at the head of the driveway waving bye-bye. I remember leaning across the front of his blue work shirt to tell Lecia that was some good crying she did, to which she lowered the paper towel so I could finally see her face. It was like a coarse brown curtain dropping to show a mask entirely different than the grinning one I’d expected. Her eyes and nose were red and her mouth was twisted up and slobbery. All of a sudden, I knew she wasn’t faking it, the grief I mean. It cut something out of me to see her hurt. And it put some psychic yardage between us that I was so far from sad and she was so deep in it.

It must have pissed Lecia off too, somehow, that gap between her misery and my relief. Later that evening, Daddy was frying up a chicken, and she chased me down over something mean I’d said about Grandma. She was fast even then (in junior high, she would run anchor on the four-forty relay), so I didn’t make it a half turn around the yard before she caught me by the back collar and yanked me down from behind. The collar choked off my windpipe, and the fall knocked the breath out of me. Before I knew what hit me, she had me down on my back in the spiky St. Augustine grass.

She sat on my chest with her full weight. Her knees dug into the ball sockets of both my shoulders. She said take it back. I sucked up enough wind to say I wouldn’t. I tried bucking my pelvis up to throw her off. Then I tried flinging my legs up to wrap around her shoulders, but she had me nailed. Still I wouldn’t take it back. All I had to fight back with was my stubbornness (which I’d built up by being a smart mouth and getting my ass whipped a lot). I never actually won a stand-up fight, with Lecia or anybody. Hence my tendency to sneak up blindside somebody weeks after the fact. But I could sure as hell provoke one and then drag it out by not giving in. I took a warped sort of pride in this, though I can see now it’s a pitiful thing to be proud of—being able to take an ass-stomping.

I don’t know how long she had me pinned. Her knees dug
twin bruises in my shoulders. I found them when putting on my pajamas that night, the size and shape of big serving spoons. She kept me there a while. The sky was going pink. I could hear Daddy’s spatula on the skillet scraping chicken drippings for cream gravy. Finally, she got tired of my not giving in and decided to spit in my eye. She hawked up a huge boogery gollop from way back in her throat, pausing every now and then to tell me she was fixing to huck it at me. It had bulk and geometry. It was hanging in a giant tear right over my face, swinging side to side like a pendulum, when Daddy came slamming out the screen to haul her off me.

That night in bed I could hear her crying into her pillow, but when I put my hand on her shoulder, she just shrugged me off.

Mother was on her way to bury Grandma during all this. Thank God, because Lecia and me fighting always made Mother sit down crying. She had always longed so fiercely for a sister that she couldn’t understand why we whaled on each other.

Anyway, while Lecia was trying to spit in my eye, Mother was driving across the Texas desert in Grandma’s old Impala, heading from the hospital in Houston to Lubbock and the funeral. She says that she wore her black Chanel suit with Grandma’s beige-and-ivory cameo, which her great-grandmother had brought from Ireland. She also wore pearl earrings, and a white pillbox hat of the type Jackie Kennedy had on when her husband was shot. (It is a sad commentary on the women of my family that we can recite whole wardrobe assemblages from the most minor event in detail, but often forget almost everything else. In fact, the more important the occasion—funeral, wedding, divorce court—the more detailed the wardrobe memory and the dimmer the hope of dredging up anything that happened.) She took the trip solo because she didn’t want to upset us. Or so she told us on the phone. “There’s no need for y’all riding all the way out there just to get upset” was how she put it. That sudden surge of maternal feeling seems odd to me now. I mean, we’d already seen all manner of nastiness and butchery, including Grandma’s lopped-off leg at
M. D. Anderson Hospital. Plus we’d watched Grandma achieve whole new levels of Nervous as the cancer ate out her brain. It just didn’t make sense.

For years Lecia had me convinced that Mother left us behind because she was hauling Grandma’s body in the backseat of the Impala. Lecia fed me this lie pretty soon after we got off the phone with Mother that night, and I swallowed it like a bigmouthed bass. I needed an excuse for being left behind, I guess. The truth—that we were murder on her nerves, which were already shot—must have been too much for me. In bed one morning I asked Lecia why didn’t Mother just put Grandma in the trunk. Lecia propped up on her elbow and said that wasn’t very nice for your dead mother. Following that same line of logic, I figured out for myself that she wouldn’t let anybody truss the old lady on top of the car like a deer, just so we’d all get to ride out too. So for years, I pictured Mother driving the five hundred miles across Texas with Grandma’s corpse stretched out on the backseat. (I guess it wasn’t till I read William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
, where the kids are dragging their dead mother across Mississippi, and the stink gets so bad and the flies and maggots get at her, that I began to figure that some ambulance had probably carted the body back. Mother had small tolerance for odors.)

The trip must have been grisly. The newly dead do, after all, rent a lot of skull space from us. So I still imagine Mother alone in that car with some ghost of her dead mother sitting beside. Mother was driving at night as Grandma would have, for the cool and the lack of traffic night provided. It’s a fourteen-hour drive, and the sky can get awful black in that time, like a big black bowl somebody set over you. One pair of headlights can put you in a trance with the white road dashes coming up in them at exact intervals. And as John Milton says, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n. I myself am Hell.”

I sometimes want to beam myself back to the old Impala so Mother won’t have to make that drive alone. I always picture myself being incredibly useful—pouring coffee from the thermos
or finding something of a soothing and classical nature on the radio—never whining or asking to pee as I surely would have. Maybe I would roll down all the windows just to shoo the mean ghost of my grandmother out.

Mother had left us at home because she was hurt. For her, being hurt meant drawing into herself. (Old joke: What’s the loneliest place in Louisiana? Bayou Self.) And that’s where I have to leave her, alone on the dark highway with the cacti rearing up and falling back down as she passes.

Grandma’s death gave me my first serious case of insomnia. When I lay in bed next to Lecia’s solid, sleeping form, that picture of Grandma’s pale arm with the ants would rear up behind my closed eyes. With it came a low humming in my head—a sound like a crazy cello player sawing the same note over and over, or like a zillion bees coming up out of the ground. In fact, that humming was the sound our car tires had made on the Orange Bridge when Mother either did or didn’t try to crash through the guardrail and fly us screaming down to the river. If I kept my eyes open, the humming stopped. If they fell closed, even for a second, that humming would swamp over every good thought I’d ever had. Nights, I lay awake with my eyes burning. What I was protecting myself against on these vigils was, in fact, my own skull, which must be the textbook definition of early-onset Nervous if ever there was one.

That small psychic crisis kicked off a metaphysical one. Why was everybody so fired up about nature all the time, and God? These kids sitting around me with their heads crooked earnestly over their giant drawing papers seemed to have forgotten that the ocean had decided for no good reason to dislodge itself on top of hundreds of people across the river in Louisiana. Our bodies could have been the ones people saw on TV newsreels after school. Families on these film clips went from one child-sized body bag to another—the bags having been lined up in rows across some movie-theater parking lot. The sheriff would unzip the bag’s top a little bit, and the daddy would peer in, then shake his head no. Then he’d step back while the sheriff rezipped before going on to
the next bag. This happened over and over till the sheriff finally unzipped the face the family was looking for—little Junior or baby Jackie, blue-skinned and bloated, tongue black and sticking out.

The cameras didn’t show those faces, of course. But Daddy had seen plenty guys dead in war. I remember he rubbed the sleeve of his faded chambray shirt and said that a human face could go just as blue as that. He also said it wasn’t the coldness of a dead man’s skin that gave you the willies, but how the skin went hard all over, so touching him was like touching wood or concrete.

During this talk, we were sitting in bed eating dinner, a habit we’d gone right back to after Grandma died. Only we’d added the drone of TV news. Its blue-white light was our family hearth. “I shit you not,” Daddy said as he tore off a hunk of biscuit. “You touch a dead man sometime.” He took a swallow of buttermilk. “Hard as that table. Got no more to do with being alive than that table does.”

That description didn’t scare me so much as the news footage of some daddy folding in on himself once he’d recognized a kid’s face. The mothers cried too, of course, and bitterly. But they seemed better equipped for it. They held each other while they cried, or fell to their knees, or screamed up at the sky. But you could tell by the moans and bellows those grown men let out that their grief had absolutely nowhere to go. I watched from the middle of my parents’ bed, a steaming plate of beans and biscuits balanced on my patch of covers, while one grown man after another buckled in the middle like everything inside him was going soft all at once, and I knew that the dead child’s face would stay on each daddy’s eyeballs forever. I stopped trusting the world partly from seeing how those meaty-faced men bellowed under the shadowy bills of their tractor caps or cowboy hats.