The Liars' Club: A Memoir (33 page)

I hoisted myself up the sink’s edge to check out that bruise
again, using the rectangular mirror on the towel dispenser. The eye had swollen back up glossy blue-black, with a streak of green at the edge. Daddy would have called it a kick-ass shiner.

Later when I lay half dozing on the banquette in the bar’s darkest corner, I could almost see Daddy taking form from the vast ether of alcohol fumes and smoke. Finally, he sat next to me. Or a ghost of him sat, for I wasn’t crazy enough to have believed that the Daddy-shape I’d conjured was actual. I knew full well he wasn’t. Still, it comforted me to see him assemble through the veil of my own lashes. He sat gangly inside his creased khakis. “You gotta keep your guard up,” he finally said. He drew a smoke from the tight line of Camels lined up like organ pipes. The glass on the black tabletop was only a little more transparent than he was. I told him I was missing him awful, but he just shrugged that off. “And lead with your left. Then she can’t reach that eye. Lemme see that.” His thumb pad pressed around the bruise, testing it for tenderness. “Hell, you’ll be all right.”

My eyes burned. I wanted to rest a minute with only Daddy keeping me suspended in the world, the way his big wide palms had when I’d learned to backfloat at the town pool. That’s how I felt listening, buoyed up in my own tiredness by Daddy’s presence. I fell dead asleep lying in his ghost lap.

Moving too fast through the folders had one other side effect even worse than Big Bertha clocking me. The principal wanted to talk to Mother about my skipping another grade.

The principal’s name was Mr. Janisch, and other than the fact that the kids called him Janbo, I remember not one distinct feature of his. He was a looming blur in a light-blue three-button suit and striped tie. Mother flounced toward him, holding out her hand. She wore her sheared-beaver coat. Gordon escorted her in. He was one of the barflies she paid in drinks to drive us to and from what she called the three poles of our being (school, bar, home). He steered her by the elbow from Mr. Janisch’s desk to the brown Naugahyde armchair in the corner.

Gordon’s being there embarrassed me. He had white girly hands. His skin was a mass of acne pits and scarring. Some poet
wrote once about “the young man carbuncular,” and that was Gordon. That day, he wore rumpled camouflage fatigues with black combat boots. Mr. Janisch asked about Gordon’s branch of military service. Old Gordon just ducked his head in fake modesty and lied through his beaver-like front teeth that that was a matter of national security. I knew for a stone fact that Gordon had been 4-F during Korea for something, being flat-footed or somehow nutty. Gordon’s whole military act was made extra pathetic by the fact that he had a big, soft ass like a woman’s. He tried to hide this by wearing his shirt pulled out, but that was the equivalent of wearing an I-have-a-fat-butt sign. In short, he was pompous and soft at once, and even having Mother explain that he was our chauffeur made me wince.

No sooner was Mother seated than Gordon lit her cigarette with a butane lighter that sent up a flame about a foot high. He pocketed the lighter, then leaned his butt against the window ledge and opened a magazine he’d brought along, the cover of which showed a cartoon Nazi, skinny and with a long ferret-like nose, squinting his eye to hold a monocle in place. This Nazi was pinning back the arms of a large-breasted blonde dressed in a shredded nurse outfit. The intensity Gordon brought to studying this magazine made me feel even worse than the fact that Mr. Janisch could see the sleazy cover.

I guess I concentrated so hard on Gordon that day, because I almost couldn’t bear to look at Mother. She’d become the picture of somebody nuts. For one thing, she’d tried to dye her hair red that fall, but wound up with a substance less hair than pelt. It was the overall color and texture of dried alfalfa. For another, she hadn’t bothered actually dressing for the meeting. She’d just stepped bare-legged into her cowboy boots, smushed some muddy lipstick on her mouth, and thrown that fur coat on over her peach silk nightgown. But the scalloped hem of the gown kept peeking out her coat bottom whenever she crossed her legs, and it seemed to me she crossed her legs a lot that morning. Maybe she was trying to show her legs off to old Janbo, a man on whom good legs might well have been lost. He just rocked back and forth in
his office chair, nodding politely over the vast green expanse of his desk blotter.

I tried to keep a stiff smile welded on my face the whole time, even when Mother invited him and his wife down to the bar for drinks on the house any afternoon. She called the Longhorn “a family place.” She bragged that her own “brilliant” daughters—she smoothed my hair at this point—sat studying at a cocktail table, while the jukebox played classical music. I distinctly recall ducking my head out from under her hand. (Something about the small betrayal of moving away from her still gives me a stab of guilt.) I knew that old Janbo knew that the Longhorn was a sleazeball dive, and I didn’t want to sully myself any worse by seeming to back up such an obvious lie.

Lecia and I did go to the bar after school. But instead of homework we played this electric game, a mix of shuffleboard and bowling, where you slid a hockey puck down a long glossy lane to whack up some bowling pins. Or else we sat at the bar sipping cherry Cokes and learning bar tricks. I knew how to build a house of playing cards, and could throw dice from a cup so they came up nothing but sevens. I could also follow the slick moves of a shell game (I was still too clumsy to execute them myself), or fold a bar towel so it resembled a huge erect horse penis that would set all the customers laughing themselves into a blended chorus of drunk donkey snorts. The only classical piece on the jukebox was Ravel’s “Bolero,” unless you counted the music from
Exodus
, which made the Irish bartender weep. Mother carried a screwdriver around in her purse to jack the volume of that box up or down depending on her mood and whether she felt like dancing. Mostly we listened to Tennessee Ernie Ford singing about mining sixteen tons of coal or following the wild geese with his heart.

Certain steady customers hadn’t moved for so long there were practically cobwebs stitching them to their bar stools. I’d seen the paintings of Edward Hopper, the washed-out misery of people slumped in diners. Mother had a book of them, one portrait more
gray-faced than the next. The Longhorn was broke out in that kind of person.

Gordon and Joey were the most animate regulars, being young enough to run errands for Mother when her headaches were too blinding for her to get behind a steering wheel.

Joey survived on disability. He picked up a monthly check from some lawyer in Colorado Springs for the black lung he’d contracted mining, which didn’t keep him from sucking down cigarettes all day and night. The index fingers on both his hands had brownish stains from nicotine. Unlike Gordon, Joey had once been handsome. He was a Mexican-Indian, small but broad-chested and narrow-hipped. He had a square jaw and black eyes Mother liked to call soulful. Those eyes had saggy pouches under them, though, and his straight black lashes stayed at half-mast all the time, the result of codeine painkillers and Valium (which Mother had also asked his doctor to prescribe for her). Plus the coughing fits he went into several times a day lasted a good five or ten minutes and stopped any bar conversation dead. He was clearly fixing to blow a lung. I patted Joey on the back when he coughed, like he only had a fishbone stuck in his throat, asking, “Did it go down the wrong pipe?” while Lecia fetched him a glass of water from behind the bar. She could be very patient, Lecia, holding out a frosted collins glass while Joey wheezed. He always left a pile of cocktail napkins he’d coughed into. Once after last call, I unfolded one and found a buckshot pattern of blood speckles that made me drop it to the floor, like it was radioactive, before Deeter swept it up with the swizzle sticks.

Gordon was sturdier-looking. He lived with his mother on the edge of town and had a pasture where we boarded our horses. “What do you do for a living, anyways?” I asked Gordon one afternoon. At the time, he was trying to teach me how to flip a filbert nut off the back of my hand and straight into my mouth. “Business interests,” Gordon said. That caused Joey to laugh his way into a hacking fit. I was patting on his bony back when Mother pulled me into the bathroom to explain it wasn’t nice to
ask what people did. That was opposite from what I’d learned in Texas, where a job was a person’s lowest common denominator, maybe even more defining than sex. You knew people based on what plant they clocked in at, which unit in that plant, and what union took their dues money—pipe fitters, Teamsters, or the OCAW.

In the morning when I’d pad downstairs in my socks, I always found either Joey or Gordon passed out on the parlor sofa. My task was to wake one and send him shivering out to warm up the car before driving us to school. We could have walked, of course. But Mother fancied our being driven. I made a habit of setting the gas flame under the kettle for coffee before I even poured myself cereal. That was meanness on my part, since the shrill whistle of that kettle woke any sleeper within range into a wincing misery.

One bright cool Sunday, Mother sent them both to Gordon’s pasture with us to catch our horses. We’d been begging for that since we’d hit Antelope. I’d torn my hair in numerous tantrums over it.

What finally inspired Mother about the project was some rodeo rider who’d dropped in the bar one Saturday night trying to sell a pair of show bridles. He was on his way to Wyoming and needed extra cash so he could ask his girl to marry him. He flipped open his hand-tooled billfold to show us her homecoming queen picture in its scratched-up vinyl window. She was wearing a rhinestone tiara in her blond flipped-up hair and smiling out at us with more straight white teeth than I’d ever seen in a human mouth. One look at her and at this cowboy’s sorry, mooning face, and Mother bought drinks all around. Then she’d rung open the cash register for a stack of bills and gone outside to buy those bridles right from his truck bed.

Joey and Gordon drove us to the pasture the next day right after dawn.

There was a hard frost on the ground when we set out across the field. The sky was dark blue. The horses stood feeding at some unbound hay bales near a ragged shed. I suddenly remembered
the sleek power of being high on Big Enough’s back, how I’d steered him around the barrel in that gymkhana, almost lithe for once, dipping out of the saddle to grab the flag from the sand bucket in a single balletic swoop that saved me seconds and won me the red ribbon. It took all the restraint I had that cold morning (I was not given to restraint) not to bolt at him. I moved easy. I started the low clicking noise Daddy had taught me to stop a squirrel on a branch.

The horse had seen me right off, of course. The minute I’d slid under the barbed wire, he stopped tearing at the straw. He lifted his long neck and pricked his black ears toward us. He nickered, which I read as a nod of greeting. Then Sure Enough stopped eating and high-stepped a few yards away, watching. We must have made a sorry procession: Lecia and I clanging the bridles, the long reins dragging on the frosted ground behind us; Joey and Gordon in their thin trench coats and scuffed-up dress shoes, both stinking of old drink. Still, I actually believed that those horses would gallop toward us, the way National Velvet had toward young Liz Taylor. But the alert look in Big Enough’s round dark eyes was not, in fact, joy at my return. It was dread. He’d gone green as a colt. His expression was some equine way of saying
not her again.

Eventually, Gordon and Joey took off after both horses. They got sick of how patiently Lecia and I held out handfuls of stiff grass, waiting for them to trot over. But the men didn’t know horses. The bridles looked odd in their hands. Gordon squatted down to my eye level and drew his assault plan on his palm like a football captain. Lecia and I were supposed to herd the horses toward the two men. But I knew the animals wouldn’t fall for it. They were faster than us by double, and way more nimble, not to mention that neither Joey nor Gordon had ever stuck a bit in a horse’s mouth.

Lecia and I gave up helping pretty quick. We watched the men chase those horses for the better part of the morning. Gordon was lumbering and slow on his feet. Joey was quicker, but more and more hung over as time wore on. His blood alcohol level must
have plummeted sharply at some point, for once he abruptly sat down in what turned out to have been a manure pile, so there was a fresh green shit stain on the butt of his tan raincoat. The horses themselves seemed tickled by the whole game. They’d lope hard a while; then, when the men flagged, they’d slow up.

The horses led the men the whole length of the field that morning—God knows how many acres. After a while, Lecia and I went back to the car to eat packets of soup crackers from the glove compartment. It was also warmer out of the wind. We played scissors-paper-stone with our hands the rest of the morning. The winner got to whip the inside of the loser’s arm—the tenderest, whitest part—with two fingers. You licked your fingers with spit to make the sting worse, then smacked them sharp against the skin. By noon, both our arms had welts all up and down them. The men stood behind the horses far out where the field gave up to rock. The animals started climbing, and the men turned back, Gordon limping slightly, Joey stopping to hack his convulsive cough every few steps.

Fall slid into winter. There were some light snows, but nothing you could sled in. Mother got a local doctor to order her up diet pills. She zipped them in the inner pocket of her Coach bag where she’d always carried baby aspirin before. The “bounce” she claimed they gave did stop her from spending whole days laid up drunk in bed. Her Empress Days, I called them, for she spent them doing nothing more than ministering to herself in small ways. I mean, she’d drink from a bottle of Smirnoff she’d made syrupy in the freezer and cut back her cuticles. Or she’d smoke while paging through back issues of
Vogue
, some blues record in the corner moaning the whole time about how shitty men were. But those days had never worried Lecia and me overmuch. If anything, we found comfort in them, for they kept Mother safe in bed. The diet pills took those days from us.