The Liars' Club: A Memoir (24 page)

When Mother gets done emptying stuff into the fire, she goes back inside the house, and we follow like herd animals. We don’t run to some neighbor house calling,
save us save us.
We wouldn’t leave Mother alone in this state. We cross the sopping lawn from the fire’s scorch and into the humid damp of the dark yard and unlit house. We traipse up the concrete steps and into the kitchen at an even pace. She walks down the long hall to her bedroom, and at that moment, some spark of something must catch inside Lecia, some desire to get us both loose, to disembark from that wild ride we’ve been on, because she nudges me to our end of the house. I go where she pushes like a blind calf.

Our room is scrambled and holds no order. That box spring tilting against the wall scares me big league. I can picture Mother heaving it and hear it hit all over again. There’s a gray-and-black quilt Grandma once stitched together from a book of men’s suit samples she got from some tailor. Lecia spreads that out like we’re on a picnic. I lie down on it, and she draws the white chenille bedspread over our knees, which we bend into mountains. The chenille is nubbly as code. We roll on our sides and face each other. The quilt squares stretch beneath us. We hopscotch from square to square in finger tag—black gabardine to charcoal flannel to gray pinstripe, like farmlands seen from up high. Mother earlier smashed all the lightbulbs in our room with a broom handle, so it’s dark. You can’t quite decipher the individual pieces of furniture tipped over and flung around, just the right angles that
poke up making a jagged mountain landscape around our floor pallet.

I can hear Mother in the kitchen now. She must be dumping cutlery from the drawers because the noise of metal crashing explodes then stops, explodes then stops. If I close my eyes it’s like a great battle right out of King Arthur is taking place in there. I can picture knights in armor bringing their swords down against shields, arrows flying into battlements, lances striking the breastplates of horsemen. When I open my eyes, though, there is only the dark plain of the quilt we lie on divided up in squares by the neat grid of suit samples. Next to me Lecia’s face is long and white under her spiky bangs. She looks baleful as a basset hound. She has stopped hopscotching and now presses her index finger against her lips to show me not to say anything, but what might I say? A long rectangle of light spills over us from the open door.

Then a dark shape comes to occupy that light, a figure in the shape of my mom with a wild corona of hair and no face but a shadow. She has lifted her arms and broadened the stance of her feet, so her shadow turns from a long thin line into a giant X. And swooping down from one hand is the twelve-inch shine of a butcher knife, not unlike the knife that crazy guy had in
Psycho
for the shower scene, a stretched-out triangle of knife that Daddy sharpens by hand on his whetstone before he dismantles a squirrel or a chicken, though it is also big enough to have hacked through the hip joint of a buck. It holds a glint of light on its point like a star, so that old rhyme pops into my head:
Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.
Then I don’t know what to wish for. Lecia’s finger stays pressed to her lips. Her eyes are big but steady on that figure in the doorway and on the knife. I wish not to scream. Screaming would piss Lecia off. I can tell. A scream is definitely not what I want to happen to me right now. It’s part wish and part prayer that zips through my head and keeps me from howling.

No sooner do I choke down that scream than a miracle happens. A very large pool of quiet in my head starts to spread. Lecia’s face shrinks back like somebody in the wrong end of your telescope.
Then even Mother’s figure starts to alter and fade. In fact, the thin, spidery female form in black stretch pants and turtleneck wielding a knife in one upraised arm is only a stick figure of my mother, like the picture I drew in Magic Marker on the Mother’s Day card I gave her last Sunday. I wrote underneath it in pink block letters that I decorated with crayon drawings of lace, “You are a nice Mom. I love you. It has been nice with you. Love from Mary Marlene.” That Sunday morning when she’d opened that card up and read it, she cried racking sobs and hugged me hard so her tears streamed down into my ears till Lecia showed up at Mother’s bedside with a vodka martini she’d mixed saying,
Here, sip at this.
Then there was another martini and another. Della Reese was singing “Mack the Knife” on the record player. She kept saying
My poor, poor babies
and
This isn’t your fault.
By the time I got my nerve up to sneak in the kitchen and upend the vodka bottle down the sink, there was only an inch left anyway.

That was Mother’s Day a week ago. On my card, I had drawn a stick-figure mom wearing a string of Ping-Pong-sized pearls around its stick neck. Now in my mind, that stick figure is what Mother becomes. She’s just a head like a ball and curly scribbles for hair. But there the likeness to the figure on my card ends. This stick figure holds a triangle knife with a star glinting off its end. My stick-figure sister is breathing deep in the chest of her white PJs, and I match my breath to hers. We lie there in that cartoon of a room for what seems like forever, and then out of nowhere Mother roars
No!
like a lioness, her mouth shapes itself into a giant black O with real definite pointy teeth for what seems like a long time. The black
NO
sails out of that mouth in a long balloon with the tail of a comet streaking past us and out the wax-papered windows into the flaming night.

That’s how God answered my prayers: I learned to make us all into cartoons. That stick woman in the center of the big black page with her eyebrows squinched down in a mad V over pin-dot eyes is no more my mother than some monster on the Saturday cartoons. She just isn’t. I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I
myself harden into a person that I hardly notice. I can feel Lecia cock her head at me, like she wants to know what the hell I have to grin about.

Now the stick-figure mom sets down the knife on the floor to dial the phone. I count the seven turns of the dial, feel it unwind under her stick finger. She’s crying, the stick mommy, with sucking sobs. A whole fountain of blue tears pours from both pin-dot eyes. I guess it’s Dr. Boudreaux who answers on the other end, because she says, “Forest, it’s Charlie Marie. Get over here. I just killed them both. Both of them. I’ve stabbed them both to death.”

After they took Mother Away, I sank into a fierce lonesomeness for her that I couldn’t paddle out of into other things. Nor did anyone come into it looking for me. By this I mean that Daddy never mentioned the night of the fire. Nor did he say when Mother might come home, other than pretty soon. Maybe our own silence on the subject—Lecia’s and mine, for we didn’t bring it up either—was meant to protect him somehow, so as not to worry him overmuch. If we failed him by not telling him all about it, he sure as shit failed us by not knowing how to ask.

At school, I cleaned up my act. There wasn’t cussing or fighting, and I won not a single exile to Frank Doleman’s office for chess. My final report card for second grade shows my getting “Satisfactory +” in both Conduct and Citizenship. Which was for me a first. No doubt, I was operating under the notion that being completely good in the eyes of all authorities might urge Mother back.

At home, I also picked up my side of our bedroom, and grudgingly helped Lecia make our bed with military tucks on the sheet corners. There my housekeeping stopped, though she pulled off a whirlwind scrubbing of the whole house every Saturday, down to the insides of the toilets. She wrought particular hell on Daddy’s
ashtrays. He couldn’t thump the ash off a Camel without her swooping down to wash and dry the ashtray before he got his hand drawn back good.

Without real data on Mother’s psychic health (or lack thereof) Lecia and I cooked up some fairly worrisome scenarios about her. On TV one night, we watched a movie called
The Snake Pit.
It starred Olivia de Havilland as this fairly nice if somewhat highstrung lady who wore over-baroque brooches and belted dresses when vacuuming her house, but who, nevertheless, had a twitchy mouth early in the movie that foreshadowed her hellacious, capital-B Breakdown later. The film’s title captures how the mental ward got portrayed. There was an icy bathtub in which one maniac got dunked under wet canvas, and a description of shock treatment that went something like this: “Then the electrodes are fixed to the temples and ZZZZZZT—thousands of volts course through the brain!” Finally, poor Ms. de Havilland got locked in a padded room and belted into one of those long-armed straitjackets that forced you to hug yourself all day and besides which looked really hot. All the while she was hallucinating snakes crawling all over. That was the picture of mental-ward life for the full-blown Nervous that Lecia and I promptly settled on. It was all we had.

The neighbor kids gave little comfort. Like us, they ran short on real data about psych wards, but they were very long on mean-assed idiom. To this day, it’s a peculiar trait of Leechfield citizenry that your greatest weakness will get picked at in the crudest local parlance. In fact, the worse an event is for you, the more brutally clear will be the talk about it. In this way, guys down there born with shriveled legs get nicknamed Gimpy, girls with acne Pizzaface.

My daddy even worked with a guy whose teenaged son had gone berserk with a twelve-gauge shotgun and marched one summer day into the junior high, where he shot and killed a guidance counselor while the principal (the alleged target, we later heard) hid in the school safe. The men on Daddy’s job right away nicknamed this kid the Ambusher. The week the local paper carried
a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers. I shit you not. Daddy claimed that the card they gave the poor fellow read: “Here’s hoping the Ambusher can finally hang up his guns!”

This kind of bold-faced ugliness was common to us. The theory behind it held that
not
mentioning a painful episode in the meanest terms was a way of pretending that the misery of it didn’t exist. Ignoring such misery, then, was equal to lying about it. Such a lie was viewed as more cruel, even, than the sad truth, because it somehow shunned or excluded the person in pain (i.e., in the above case, the Ambusher’s daddy) from everybody else. Plus ignoring such a grotesque event as the lobotomy of one’s only son would suggest that the guy was somehow made weak by it or “couldn’t take it.”

So neighbor kids talked to me in language meant to toughen me to the cold facts of my life. I heard how Mother was crazy as a mudbug and nutty as a fruitcake. She didn’t have both oars in the water. She had been slam-dunked in the loony bin, the funny farm, the Mental Marriott, the Ha-Ha Hotel.

I got my ass whipped three or four times by jumping like a buzz saw into kids popping off this way about her. Finally, Daddy urged me to start biting down hard on any kid getting the better of me. He knew that to back up would bring a steady stream of ass-whippings, and my size precluded any bona fide victories. “Lay the ivory to ’em, Pokey” was how he put it. Even if I got whipped after, a bite left a mark that’d stay with a person. That summer, I bit to draw blood seven or eight times. But the time I took a good chunk out of Rickey Carter’s shoulder ultimately led to events that cinched my reputation as the worst kid on the block.

The red-faced Rickey, who was twelve and couldn’t bear having busted into tears in front of the littler kids after I’d chomped on him, scanned around for a way to get even, and then jumped on Lecia. Jumping Lecia always proved a mistake. Rickey was older and way bigger, but she was tough as a boot. She couldn’t walk into the drugstore for an ice cream without some roughneck
pointing at her and saying, “That there’s Pete Karr’s daughter,” which praise always caused some guy’s eyebrow to cock itself north a notch. Anyway, Lecia had pinned Rickey pretty quick when his baby brother Philip came up behind her with a ball bat and brought it down with all his might between her shoulder blades, knocking her out. At the crack of wood against spinal column, the whole gang broke running back to their separate yards. Lecia toppled, and a few minutes passed before her cheeks flushed and her eyes fluttered open.

The next day right after dawn, I pulled down my BB gun from the top bookshelf and went on a rampage that prefigured what Charles Whitman—the guy who shot and killed thirteen people from the tower at the University of Texas—would do a few years later. I stuck a can of hot tamales with a can opener in a paper bag and fixed myself a jelly jar of tea. While all the other kids were still sitting around in their pajamas eating their doughnuts with powdered sugar and watching cartoons, I was sneaking across the blackberry field behind our house. There was a lone chinaberry tree at the field’s center, and I shinnied up it, then pulled my BB gun after me to wait for the Carter kids. They’d planned to berrypick that morning so their mama could make a cobbler. I’d overheard talk about it.

I didn’t wait long. The sun had gone from pink to hot white when the whole Carter clan clamored across the grassy ditch circling the field’s edge. Their daddy was leading them; they straggled behind, each with a saucepan or bait bucket. I lifted the BB gun and sighted through its little V as close as I could to the white glare of Rickey’s glasses. I fully intended to pop him between the eyes. I repeated Daddy’s injunction to pull any trigger slow: “Don’t jerk it, Pokey,” he always said. I didn’t, and after the satisfying little zing, a miracle happened. I saw Rickey Carter slap his neck, like he thought a wasp had stung him.

My next few shots missed. But Mr. Carter heard them skitter through the long grass and tracked the noise till he finally caught sight of my shape in the tree behind leaf cover. Even I could see the little bloody hole in Rickey’s neck where I’d pegged him. Mr.
Carter yelled my name, then yelled was that me. But like Brer Rabbit, I just laid low. Then he yelled did I have some kind of weapon up in that tree, and Babby Carter dropped her pot and ran crying back to the road with Philip right behind her. Shirley took out running too. Her flip-flops slapped against her bare feet till she jumped the ditch and hit asphalt on the other side. Rickey put his hands on his hips like he was pissed off, but he stepped sideways so that his daddy stood between him and my chinaberry tree.
You pussy
, I thought, as if Rickey’s not wanting to get shot were a defining mark against his manhood. Mr. Carter screamed to get down from there, that I could put somebody’s eye out with a pellet gun. And I came back with a reply that the aging mothers in that town still click their tongues about. It was easily the worst thing anybody in Leechfield ever heard a kid say. “Eat me raw, mister,” I said. I had no idea what this meant. The phrase had stuck in my head as some mild variant on “Kiss my ass,” which had been diluted from overuse.