The Liars' Club: A Memoir (29 page)

On the other end of the couch, Mother stayed dry-eyed. That’s no testament to how she felt, mind you. Maybe she held down a wellspring of ache, or maybe not. She wasn’t really there, of course. The enormous screwdriver had taken her Away, which was its purpose.

They point-blank asked us who we wanted to live with. Mother was staying in Colorado; Daddy had to go back home. They spread those facts before us as if setting out two ice cream flavors we got to pick. Which would be better to have—a daddy or a mother? Or we could divvy up ourselves if we wanted, so each got one.

Lecia called me into the kitchen for a powwow then. She claimed she’d slap me senseless were I to shed a tear. But I was nowhere near crying. I wanted to curl up in a ball.

We peeked around the doorjamb into the living room. The backs of our parents’ heads poked over the sofa back. They sat not speaking like strangers on a subway. That one would go forever Away seemed impossible. I pictured the globe with its dividing meridians. I knew how far it was from Texas to Colorado. But it wasn’t just geography I was picking. I eeny-meeny-minied between their two heads a second. I considered a coin toss. In my
head, I zigzagged between swamp and mountain, between impossible heat and blue cool. I still wanted to lie down on that floor with the Italian tile against my hot cheek and go noddyblinkems till the bears woke us up. While I fretted, Lecia’s gaze went very level, as if she’d seen this choice coming across the far sky like a weather front.

She chose, finally. If we left Mother by herself, she’d get in capital-T Trouble. But Daddy would just go back to work at the Gulf, so we’d always know where he was. The logic seemed solid enough.
Let’s go back in there and break it to them
, she said.

Daddy left the next day about dawn. Mr. McBride’s truck lunged up to the house. He stepped out on the running board and left his motor going and said no to coffee when Mother asked. Daddy came out to heave his army duffel bag in the truck bed. I’d tried to zip myself up into that bag in the middle of the night. I buried myself among the flat-folded hankerchiefs and balled-up socks. I fit pretty well, too. But I’d stopped the zipper right under my chin, being basically a sissy about the dark.

That’s where Daddy found me asleep in the morning. He smelled like Old Spice. His weathered face was nicked up. There were red polka dots of blood on which he’d stuck white squares of toilet paper. He squatted down with his brown leather dopp kit in one hand.
Get outa there, Pokey
, he said, drawing the zipper down to my belly button.
God sakes, you’ll break a fella’s heart.

Then Mr. McBride’s gray Chevy truck was drawing Daddy away down the mountain. His head got smaller in the window, till it was no more than a black dot, like one of those towns on the map we’d once been in such an all-fired hurry to get to. All across Texas I’d ridden behind that head. I knew every comb mark in it. Daddy’s leaving never even dimly occurred to me as possible on that trip, though Mother’s was a constant, unspoken threat. But Daddy was the guy you set your watch by. He woke in the same humor every morning, asking did you want oatmeal or eggs. And now Mr. McBride’s truck was winding him away from us in hairpin turns down the mountain. I finally stopped watching for glimpses of the truck to break through the dark spaces between
trees and put my head down and ran hard down the dirt road. I kept running till the dust gave way to asphalt, even though that vehicle had long since disappeared.

Back at the cabin, Mother pulled the rollers out of her hair in about three swipes of her hand and announced that she felt like a freed slave.

We drove to a vast and canyonlike Denver department store where she bought what she called an honest-to-God cocktail dress, along with church dresses for Lecia and me (though we’d rather have chewed linoleum than gone to Sunday school). The place gave me vertigo. The glass cubicles were sharp-edged. They gleamed, displaying impossibly bright scarves, jeweled cigarette cases, real gold chains for the sole purpose of holding your glasses around your neck. The smell of new dye from the clothes made my eyes sting. Metal escalators meandered between floors and threatened to eat my toes off at the end.

We all got fur coats. Mother’s white shirred beaver was softer all over than the inside of my arm. It had a lining of pale beige silk that felt on my bare shoulders like the menthol lotion you get smoothed on for sunburn. Around the heavy swirling hem of that coat ran a wide strip of black lace. The parkas Lecia and I picked out had rabbit fur around the hoods and pockets deep enough to squirrel extra dinner rolls in.

That afternoon, we flounced into a grand hotel’s great marble lobby hung with chandeliers. The guy running the elevator had on the brass-buttoned uniform of a naval officer. He drew a steady paycheck for nothing more than pressing buttons all day, he said. That caused me to speculate on how the union in those parts must play hell with the hotel companies. He and Mother laughed at that like old pals. He was still laughing when she pressed five dollars into his white-gloved hand.

That night in the dining room, our table had a whole starting lineup of spoons. Still our waiter brought eensy baby forks with our shrimp cocktails. He wore a tuxedo and claimed the potato soup was cold on purpose. There was another guy with a gold
cup tied around his neck who tasted Mother’s wine before she got to. At the end of the meal, the chef himself came out of the kitchen in his puffy hat with a skillet of chopped-up bananas he set fire to right at the table, then ladled over our gold-plated dishes of ice cream. Mother ordered a bottle of Dom Pérignon and crystal glasses for us to share. We ratholed the cocktail forks in our skirt pockets to steal as souvenirs. Mine looked like a devil’s trident belonging to a tiny little devil, I told Lecia, and she nearly wet her pants laughing. We clinked our glasses to staying in that hotel like princesses forever. Meanwhile, the waiters in their black clothes took our plates away and scrubbed crumbs off the table with silver-backed brushes they maneuvered using wrist movements too strict to seem natural.

All this time, Daddy had fallen out of my head completely, which must have been Mother’s plan, of course, But when the fact of his absence came rushing back through me like a train, it brought a whole coal car of evil feeling.

I was lying under emerald satin covers with a leather-bound breakfast menu tilted on my middle. Lecia was still a lump on the bed’s far side, but the drapes held a line of light at their bottom that made it morning. Hunger wasn’t bothering me, but I was wondering intensely what a Belgian waffle was when out of nowhere, my last sight of Daddy came sliding fast through my head. Mr. McBride’s gray truck vanished behind a stand of evergreens. The menu dropped from my hands. How could Daddy’s going have slipped my mind? I’d always measured my loyalty in unshakable terms. My head brimmed with tortures I could endure for noble causes, comrades, family honor. But I’d been bought off cheap: a rabbit-fur coat and the stolen fork of a baby devil had shoved Daddy clear from my mind.

By the time Mother started keeping company with a cowboy from the stable, a fellow named Ray who had the small and peglike teeth of a rabbit, I’d stopped riding Big Enough. Colorado and the horses took Daddy Away. I vowed to prove myself worthy of his return through deprivation, thereby luring him back. So I
spent my days reading and trying to write poetry, which I did in the cool comfort of the Christian Science Reading Room. Here’s a bona fide excerpt:

One afternoon I’d nodded off over my volume of e. e. cummings and been poked awake with a pointy finger-bone by the readingroom matron, who suggested that I wobble myself home to nap.

And it was there I found Mother, shirtless, lying flat on the floor before the fireplace with old Ray astraddle her like she was a pony he was fixing to break. He was kneading her shoulder muscles. His cowboy hat sat perched on the sofa back, and his brown hair looked specially greasy and mashed down. In fact, his hat had left a dent all the way around his skull as if it had a flip top. I stared at him, my copy of cummings clutched to my chest. Of course, Ray leapt upright. He was grossly bowlegged. (In Leechfield parlance, he couldn’t trap a hog in a ditch.) Meanwhile, Mother patted her hand around till she laid hold to her bra, which she demurely slipped under her torso and hooked in back with one sure hand, still facedown the whole time. Ray said,
Well, hello there, Slow Poke.
His voice was loud and rusty. And I corrected him right off: “Pokey,” I said without blinking. “My daddy calls me Pokey, not Slow Poke. Slo-Poke is a brown sucker you buy that breaks your teeth.” Mother pulled her shirt over her head and said she was glad I’d come home for lunch for a change. That lie wounded me worse than the shirtless fact of my mother stretched half-naked under a cowboy. She wasn’t one bit glad to see me.

Ray quit his stable-hand’s job the next week, disappearing for parts unknown. His leaving was coincident with Mother’s solo trip to Mexico. “Acapulco, here I come,” she’d said, promising to buy us both sombreros. But when Mother returned from that trip
to pick us up (we’d been staying with the stable master’s family for pay) the man who stood from the car was distinctly not Ray. He was too tall and lanky and black-haired.

I was walking two lathered horses around the corral at the time, and the sight of that male figure by the car made something quicken in me. He stood through the cloud of dust the Impala kicked up. He wore gray slacks and what might have been a shortsleeved white shirt from Sears. I dropped the reins of both animals, prompting Mr. McBride to yell,
Don’t leave them horses wet.
But I was sprinting toward that tall figure with all the hope of a kid on Christmas morning. I did not, however, skid to a stop in front of my daddy, whose large hands I’d already imagined lifting me light as a ghost to whirl my feet above the dusty stable yard. No, it wasn’t Daddy standing on the passenger side of Mother’s car. It was Hector, the barkeep from the cowboy joint. Mother leaned over the car roof holding out a hand weighed down by a diamond solitaire ring. I stopped in my tracks.
Say hello to your new daddy
, she said. And I could hear Lecia close the gap behind me, her spurs clanking while I took in Hector’s alligatorlike grin, and Lecia whispered what I was already thinking:
Oh shit.

One Sunday after Hector came, Lecia and I walked down to the stable and found the tack room still locked up, though the sun was high enough to show behind the mountains. Somebody had been and gone already. The stalls were all mucked out, with clean straw strewn around. And there were oats in the bins and fresh water in the troughs. But the McBrides’ truck wasn’t parked in the dirt driveway in front of their trailer. Banging on their aluminum screen door brought no face to stare down at us. I crossed the bridge and peeked in the café window. Not a soul perched on a single counter stool. I told Lecia it was like that
Twilight Zone
episode where space guys had kidnaped everybody on the planet except this grouchy old teacher, who wound up being sad that she’d always been such a jackass to everybody.

We sat on the cinder blocks in front of the café. The owner had lined those blocks up there to stop drunk folks from plowing straight through the plate glass. Lecia pulled our sandwiches out of a paper bag. Bologna on Wonder bread—mine with mustard, hers with mayo. Going home wasn’t an option. Mother and Hector had tried one on (that’s how we heard the phrase “tied one on”) the night before. They’d doubtless either still be passed out or coping with the morning whirlies. Hector had concocted a
hangover remedy involving raw eggs, vodka, and Pepto-Bismol. I called it a Dismal Flip. The very sight of it tipping up to his lips sent Mother scurrying to the bathroom with the projectile heaves. So mornings with the newlyweds were something we tended to miss. In fact, since Hector’s Florsheim shoes first crossed our threshold, we hadn’t piled into that bed a single morning to watch the bears. I know for my part, I wouldn’t have gone into Mother’s room before noon on a dare.

I ate only the middle of my sandwich, in a nibbled circle that pissed Lecia off. She hated me doing anything eensy. She said that was how squirrels ate, and then she pitched my leftover crust at the sparrows. Not a car passed while they pecked it up. The sun got a notch higher. Otherwise, nothing. After a while, we gave up hoping the McBrides would pull up to unlock our saddles. We played a primitive form of kickball with the wadded lunchbag across the bridge and back to the stable.

Lecia found a pair of hackamores hanging from a nail, and we took our horses for a short lope along a narrow, roller-coaster length of trail with a dip in it that made your stomach drop toward the end. The horses got lathered doing it. We walked them in figure eights through the corral, then brushed and watered them. We killed the rest of the morning snake-hunting in the field behind the stable. There were two or three grass snakes writhing across each other in the bottom of an oat bucket when the McBrides’ truck finally lumbered across the bridge and set us running for it.

Mr. McBride said hey, and we said hey back. He asked me didn’t I know what day it was. I said Sunday, from the look of things. Then Polly stepped down from the running board and swung around to face us with their new baby girl balanced on her hip. That baby’s face stays in my mind as having an uncanny resemblance to Winston Churchill.
That’s a sad face
, I was thinking,
for a girl to bear forward through the world
, when Polly said hadn’t we even sent our daddy a Father’s Day card.

The question doused me quick in cold shame. Lecia barged right in over my quiet and said sure we had. Plus we’d sent him
a whole tackle box of hand-painted lures from Denver, a bag of red rubber worms, and a new Zippo reel with hundred-pound test line. Mr. McBride said he didn’t think there was a hundred-pound test line, not in nylon anyways. But Lecia would have backed him straight to the wall with that lie before she’d have let it go. She said that Colorado trout were much bigger pussies than East Texas bass. That meant that Yankee tackle stores didn’t need to stock heavy line. Down in Leechfield, she said, hundred-pound was about the lightest line you could get, the biggest being as big around as her wrist, which she held out for Mr. McBride to study as proof. Everybody around the stable had gotten way sick of Lecia’s Texas-this and Texas-that. That morning Mr. McBride just squeezed her shoulder before heading to the office to open up. His kids spilled out of the truck and scattered, me hating every one of them for having a daddy. I wanted my own tall daddy to come there and make a me a patch of shade with his big cool shadow.