The Liars' Club: A Memoir (21 page)

My birthday was such a night. Esther Phillips was moaning out “Misery” from the turntable: “Put no headstone on my grave. / All my life I been a slave.…” Those lyrics should have tipped me off to all that was coming. But Mother was baking me a lasagna, which smell I loved better than breath itself. I was also caught up playing with an old pair of army binoculars Daddy had given me that morning.

I stepped through the back screen door and held them up to my eyes. Through our fence slats, I could make out Mickey Heinz sitting on his fat knees next door, running his dump truck through the dirt. I could never see Mickey without a wince. I had once gotten him to smoke a cigarette made out of Nestlé’s Quik we’d rolled up in tissue paper. It burnt his tongue. In fact, he’d blistered it so bad that he’d run to show it to his mother, not considering how she and all his people belonged to one of those no-drinking, no-smoking, no-dancing churches. Mrs. Heinz whipped his butt bad with a hairbrush. We listened to the whole thing squatting right underneath the Heinzes’ bathroom window—the whap-whap of that plastic brush on Mickey’s blubbery little ass, him howling like a banshee.

That January morning, I watched Mickey through my birthday binoculars. I was halfway thinking maybe I’d trot over to his yard and get him to hide his eyes for hide-and-seek, then just go home
and watch him look for me till he started snubbing. I had almost talked myself into doing this when I heard Daddy’s truck lunge into the garage.

I turned my glasses to the garage door and made out his big silver hard hat bobbing toward me. (Mercury’s helmet always put me in mind of that hard hat, for some reason—minus the wings, of course.) “How’s the birthday, Pokey?” he said. Then his hard hat left my field of vision. A second later his work boot scuffed the concrete step beside me. I lowered the glasses and looked up and said fine.

Except for the late-night visits he always made to double-tuck the covers under my chin, I hadn’t seen him much that January. The union’s contract with Gulf Oil had run out, and he’d been out on strike all month, along with everybody else in the county. When he wasn’t walking the picket line, he went shrimping or duck hunting—anything to put food on the table. Nights, he hung out at the union hall waiting for any news about the talks to trickle back. Like Mother, he’d become the sort of stranger I longed for a glimpse of without ever expecting to see up close.

But that morning he’d given me the binoculars and a new Archie comic all wrapped up before he headed off to the line. The sweetness of it had drawn tears from some deep sour place way behind my eyes. “Shit, don’t cry, Pokey,” he said with a wry grin. He’d finally promised to come home for supper and cake that evening if I’d stop crying so’s to break his heart.

Anyway, I’d been waiting on the back step the better part of the afternoon, holding back a floodgate of talk for him. When his shadow finally fell on me, I started to prattle about how I’d gone to Beaumont with Mother and Lecia that morning to buy my birthday dress.

It was a black crepe dress—the first black dress I’d owned. Just sitting in it made me feel like a movie star, I’d told him. We’d had hell finding a kid’s dress in black. But Mother had driven us all over the county. (Finding that dress, in fact, was about the first event other than an occasional meal that she’d gotten up for since coming back from the funeral.) We’d at last settled on an
A-line dress that had a big white clown collar hanging all loose and drapy, with three bona fide rhinestone buttons down the front. The dress had been “cut on the bias,” according to the saleslady. Lecia took one look and said where’s the funeral, but I was already prissing in front of the three-part mirror. When I spun around, both dress and collar fanned out sideways in fluttery ripples. Mother thought I looked like the ballet dancer in my Japanese music box. She rolled her eyes and said, “What the hell,” when she handed the saleslady her charge plate. Not ten minutes later, she’d also bought Lecia a chemistry set from the toy department. On the way home, we’d stopped for shrimp rémoulade at Al’s Seafood, where Mother made quick work of two vodka martinis, to celebrate.

Daddy said the dress looked pretty while he wiped his feet. But he wasn’t even looking my way. He was being double-careful to worry all the mud off his boots and onto the black welcome mat. Then he slipped into the house.

Suddenly it dawned on me that I wasn’t supposed to tell Daddy we’d charged stuff on Mother’s plates—the shrimp and the chemistry set and all, not to mention my dress, which cost sixty-three dollars. Nobody said it was secret. But he wasn’t drawing any pay, a fact he harped on more or less constantly. The image of him thumping the morning paper and talking about how Gulf Oil was trying to chicken-shit the working man out of a decent meal came to me. Not two days before he’d taken a box of canned goods and our outgrown clothes to the union hall. Kids in the big Catholic families were going hungry, he’d said. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that what we’d done that day—Mother, Lecia, and I—crossed some unspoken line between good times and bad behavior. I also knew that the black dress I had on crossed another line between an outfit and a get-up. I felt like a witch in church. And I kept feeling that way till the black dress was dangling on its hanger, and I was back in blue jeans.

Later, I was on the rug undressing Barbie for the umpteenth time when my parents’ mad voices floated back to me. Lecia was next to me, trying to pin her Barbie’s straw-colored hair into a
French twist with a bobby pin. I couldn’t make out the words but the gist was plain. Mother roared and slammed kitchen cupboards. The screen banging closed finally signaled Daddy’s walking out. By this time, Daddy had adopted that mean dog Nipper, and he came out from under the house, yipping and lunging against his chain. Daddy’s boots scuffed down the steps. The screen banged again, and I heard what I quickly figured out was the glass lasagna casserole shattering on the patio after him. “It’s her birthday, you sonofabitch,” Mother yelled. Lecia just wound that French twist into a tight coil and said, “Tape Ten, Reel One Thousand: Happy Goddamn Birthday.”

Out in the kitchen, Mother stood at the sink, holding both wrists under running water. You could see a big splotch of red under her sharp cheekbone, like somebody had dabbed mad on her face with a paintbrush. “You want some aspirin?” she said to me, and I said no, thanks. Outside, Nipper was going yip yip yip. Mother tossed a handful of baby aspirin in her mouth, then dipped her head under the faucet to wash them down. She took the German chocolate cake down from the top of the fridge. “We can have this cake for supper,” she said. Lecia came in, bringing a warm space up close behind me. I told Mother that she could take the dress back, it was no big deal. “No I can’t,” she said. Then she started planting candles in the muddy top of the cake. The house still smelled of lasagna and of the fresh coconut she’d split and carved and grated for the cake. “Forget about the dress, for Christ’s sake,” she said.

I went outside, where Mickey was still visible in slices through the fence slats. He was sitting in the dirt like a plaster lawn figurine. He’d heard it all, of course. You could count on Mickey to run tattling to the whole neighborhood that Mother had called Daddy an SOB. I took a minute to wish his kneeling figure harm before picking my way around the glass and splattered lasagna.

In the garage, I could at first see the ruby end of Daddy’s cigarette and nothing else. After a second, my eyes adjusted. Then I could make out his white T-shirt and the glint of the bottle he lifted to his lips. “Daddy?” I said.

“Just go in the house,” he said. The cigarette brightened for a moment as he drew on it. “It don’t make a shit,” he said. Then a minute later, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Outside the locusts started whirring in their husks. That was the only sound till I heard somewhere in the high trees outside what I took for a bat screech. “That a bat?”

“Go in the house, Pokey,” he said. Then he said, almost like an afterthought, “Why don’t you go on in and ask your mother if she wants to head over to Bridge City for some barbecue crabs.”

Back in the house, the shattered lasagna dish sat in a dustpan on the sink’s edge. Mother was touching the last match to the last candle when I came in. The black fan sweeping past us made the candles fade and brighten on her face. Lecia’s face next to hers was as blank as a shovel. She said, go on and make a wish, you little turd. I squinted my eyes as hard as I could and wished silently to go and live some other where forever, with a brand-new family like on
Leave. It to Beaver.
Then I sucked up as much air as I could get and blew the whole house dark.

I don’t remember our family driving across the Orange Bridge to get to the Bridge City café that evening. Nor do I remember eating the barbecued crabs, which is a shame, since I love those crabs for their sweet grease and liquid-smoke taste. I don’t remember how much Mother drank in that bayou café, where you could walk to the end of the dock after dinner and toss your leftover hush puppies to hungry alligators.

My memory comes back into focus when we’re drawing close to the Orange Bridge on the way home. From my spot in the backseat, I can see a sliver of Daddy’s hatchet-shaped profile—his hawk-beak nose and square jaw. Some headlights glide over him and then spill onto me. I want to see Mother’s face, to see which way her mood is drifting after all the wine. But I’m staring at the back of her head in its short, wild tangle of auburn curls.

All at once, the car rears back the way a horse does underneath you if it shies away from a small, skittery animal on the road, and we’re climbing up the bridge. The steel webbing of the road sets the tires humming. That matches up just right with that
humming in my head left over from the hurricane day. The night streams over the car and fans away like black water. I can almost feel a long wake of dark dragged out behind us. Sometime during this ride, the car has filled up with that musky snake smell from Grandma’s old room, a smell I hadn’t even noticed had been gone from our lives till it flooded back. Lecia rolls down the window, maybe to get the stink out. Her hair is spronging loose from its French twist. The wind’s about to suck me out that window and over the bridge rail. The rushing sound marries with the tires humming till a big rocket fills the small car space and makes me feel little.

I muster all my courage to look out my window at the long drop down. It makes my stomach lurch. The steel girders jerk by my window in a fast staccato. In the distance, I can see two flaming refinery towers. They make a weird Oz-like glow that bleeds up the whole bottom part of the sky. It’s a chemical-green light the color of bread mold, rising up the night sky like a bad water stain climbing wallpaper. Out beyond the river there are marshes and bayous. A black barge moves slow under the bridge.

Mother is shouting, shouting she wished herself dead before she’d ever married Daddy. She wished she’d been struck by lightning on this very bridge before she crossed over into that goddamn bog. Leechfield is the asshole of the universe, the great Nowhere. And Daddy is a great Nothing. I feel over for Lecia’s hand, and it’s a cold fist knotted shut. I set it down the way you’d put down a glass of water you don’t want to spill.

Then out of all the darkness I see Mother’s white hands rising from her lap like they were powered and lit from inside. Like all the light in the world has been poured out to shape those hands. She’s reaching over for the steering wheel, locking onto it with her knuckles tight. The car jumps to the side and skips up onto the sidewalk. She’s trying to take us over the edge. There’s no doubt this time. I mash my eyes closed, and Lecia heaves herself over on top of me. Both of us topple down in the backseat well, so I can’t see anything, but I can feel the car swerve while Mother and Daddy wrestle for the wheel.

Then there’s a loud noise in the front seat like a branch cracking, after which the car goes steady again. I can almost feel the tires click back in between the yellow lines. The rearview mirror got knocked long-ways when they were wrestling, I guess. So when Lecia and I crane up from the backseat, our two scared faces float in it. We look like sea creatures coming up from the fathoms.

Amazingly enough, the car is off the bridge and back on the road, safe. Mother’s lying slack-jawed against her window where Daddy has socked her to get control of it. He’s never hit her before, and the punch came from a very short distance, but she’s down for the count.

When she wakes up, we’ll be pulling into our driveway. She’ll rake her fingernails all the way down Daddy’s cheek, drawing deep blood so he looks for days like some leopard’s paw has gone at him. The kids playing night tag in the Heinzes’ yard will stop their game to gather at our property line and watch us spill out of the car, Mother still trying to claw Daddy, Daddy holding her wrists in his iron hands. At some point, Joe Dillard will sidle over to ask me what they’re fighting about, and his brother will crack that they’re fighting over a bottle. That’s the last thing I remember anybody saying, Junior Dillard in his wise-assed voice saying, “Probably fighting over a bottle.” Then Mother breaks loose from Daddy to stamp her foot at the group of kids, and they scatter like buckshot into their own dark yards. And that’s it, that’s what I remember about my birthday.

Grandma wound up leaving Mother a big pile of money, which didn’t do us a lick of good, though Lord knows we needed it. Daddy’s strike had dragged on till mid-March, pulling us way down in our bill-paying. He managed to keep up with the mortgage and utilities okay, but the grocery and drug bills and other sundries got out from under him. When he picked up his check at the paymaster’s window on Fridays, he cashed it right there. Then he’d drive to Leechfield Pharmacy and go straight up to the pill counter in back to tell Mr. Juarez—kids called him Bugsy, after the cartoon bunny—that he’d come to pay at his bill. I can still see Daddy winking while he said it,
at.
He’d squint down at his billfold and lick his thumb and make a show of picking out a single crisp five-dollar bill and squaring it up on the counter between them. But that little “at” held back a whole tide of shame. It implied the bill weighed more than Daddy, superseded him in a way. In Jasper County, where he’d been raised, buying on credit was a sure sign of a man overreaching what he was. Even car loans were unheard-of, and folks were known to set down whole laundry sacks stuffed with one-dollar bills when it came time to pick up a new Jeep or tractor.