The Liars' Club: A Memoir (39 page)

We didn’t even have to beg to sleep with him, just bounce twice and say please once before he said okay. First, he lit the gas stove in the bedroom with a
whump
, then smoothed my socks over the top, so they’d be warm come morning. Lecia buttoned our dresses up on hangers while he stripped off his khakis. His legs were white and skinny poking out of blue-patterned boxers. The pinched fingernails he ran all along his pants crease, to sharpen it, made a stuttery noise in the cloth,
rrrrr.
After, he draped them over a chair back and hit the light.

Lecia and I lay down in the vast bed with Daddy in the middle. He slept on top of the covers because he couldn’t stand anything binding his feet. And from the second Lecia and I slid our legs under the sheet on either side of him, he was crying.

It’s a fine trait of Texas working men that they cry. My daddy cried at parades and weddings. Watching the American flag slide up the pole before a Little League game could send tears down
his leathery face. That night, I stoppered my ears against it. Still, I could make it out under the seashell noise of my own skull. Sniff and sniff and a deep-chested moan of grief rising from him. Through the window, the refinery towers burned, sending out black strands of smoke against the acid-green sky, so many threads weaving around each other. I finally unplugged my ears and the sobs rushed in with gale force. I squeezed his broad hand in both my smaller ones till I thought the finger bones would snap like twigs. I only let go when he needed to reach under his pillow for a red bandana to wipe his nose on.

Long after I thought he’d drifted off, his cracked voice rose up to ask if we’d say a prayer that Mother would come on home.

He had to say it, of course, for such a request struck us wordless. I’d never heard Daddy pray. He’d only gone to church for funerals, when he was toting somebody in a box. “Lord,” Daddy started, “please bring these babies’ momma back—” Then he broke down crying some more. We patted on either side of him till he quieted and Lecia threw in a big hearty amen.

I lay awake a long time listening, Daddy with his arm over my shoulder, Lecia behind him. We warped together like planed lumber. At least, that’s the thought I had. We were just like the three curved boards for the hull bottom of some boat that only needed gluing and caulking together.

When Mother did come back, she arrived unannounced in a rented yellow Karmann Ghia sports car with Hector behind the wheel. She unfolded from the car’s low-slung seat. Her alligator heels sank in the spongy ground, leaving holes like a crawfish makes. For weeks, I’d practiced the cool indifference I’d greet her with if she ever came back. But when I saw that beaver coat hem swirl around her calves like so much sea foam, all my resolve washed away. I slammed out the door and bounded toward her. I would have reached her first, too, had not Lecia shoved me down in the flower bed crowded with English ivy.

They’d come to pick up some clothes, Mother told Daddy. No more was said in the way of plan or explanation. If he knew
she was coming before, he hadn’t let on. He leaned on the far porch while she stooped down to hug me, that coat soft as any bunny and exuding Shalimar. “I miss you, baby,” she said. She eyed Daddy over my shoulder the way you’d check the chain length of a tethered hound before you stepped in his yard. He didn’t flinch under the gaze. He stayed rock still, but gave her wide berth. Eventually, she and Hector set about dragging dresses by armloads to the car, trailing hangers all down the yard and walk.

If the pope had advanced on us, outfitted in embroidered robes with acolytes behind wagging gold incense burners, the neighbors would have been held in less thrall. No sooner had that low yellow car halted in its tracks than every family on the block started from their various houses, prepared to stay a while, wearing wind-breakers and winter jackets and rain slickers in case the fat clouds overhead broke open. They pulled their lawn chairs out of garage storage, aimed them to face us, and sat watching like we were some drive-in movie projected across the soft gray horizon. The misty rain that speckled the air didn’t stop them. Mrs. Dillard just unfolded her clear plastic rain bonnet from its tuckaway pocket and tied it right under her chin, so her hairdo wouldn’t get sticky. Mrs. Sharp wielded the massive black umbrella they toted to football games.

The men who weren’t working stood together under the eaves of the Carters’ garage, smoking, the red coals of their cigarettes visible when drawn on. They were watching too. Don’t think they weren’t. The kids scampered behind their front-yard ditches like nothing special was happening, all but Carol Sharp, who crossed the street to stand right at the edge of our yard. I gave her the finger in full view of everybody. That set her loping back to tattle, her Keds slapping against the wet asphalt.

I walked back and forth along the ditch’s slope till it struck me that I’d once seen a cow dog patrol its territory with the exact same level of concentration I was bringing to bear. Mother and Hector toted some more dresses out the house. They were made
of silk, colors of whipped cream and beige and palest tangerine shimmering in the gauzy air. I could just imagine the neighbor ladies reckoning their worth—“Why, one a them alone’s worth Pete’s whole paycheck…” I hated them at that instant, hated their broad heavy bottoms slung low in those stripy garden chairs. I hated their church suppers, their lumpy tuna casseroles, their Jell-O molds with perfect cubes of pear and peach hanging suspended. I hated their crocheted baby booties and sofa shawls, the toilet-paper covers shaped like poodles everybody worked on one summer.

For the first time, I felt the power my family’s strangeness gave us over the neighbors. Those other grown-ups were scared. Not only of my parents but of me. My wildness scared them. Plus they guessed that I’d moved through houses darker than theirs. All my life I’d wanted to belong in their families, to draw my lunch bag from the simple light and order of their defrosted refrigerators. The stories that got whispered behind our supermarket cart, or the silence that fell over the credit union when Daddy shoved open the glass door—these things always set my face burning. That afternoon, for the first time, I believed that Death itself lived in the neighboring houses. Death cheered for the Dallas Cowboys, and wrapped canned biscuit dough around Vienna sausages for the half-time snack.

I picked up one of the coat hangers that had dropped on the ground, cocked my arm, and hurled it across the street at the Carters’ house. It sailed like a boomerang, that hanger, but didn’t even cross the street. Daddy called out to me then. “Pokey, come on in here.” He’d moved just inside the screen, his profile sharp through the fine mesh.

Hector slammed down the Kharmann Ghia’s hatch. Mother kept looking back at us, at Lecia and Daddy and me, behind the screen. I could feel us pulling on her like magnets. Her face went soft. On either side of her lipsticked mouth were deep parentheses of fret. I didn’t hear what Hector said to her. I was too busy in my head pulling on Mother to stay with us, using a prayer full
of thee’s and thou’s. Lecia later told me that Hector had told Mother to get her ass in gear, or some such.

What happened next points to Hector having said at least something that bad, for Daddy fast closed the space between himself and the yellow car. He reached inside and dragged Hector out by the shoulders, though Hector tried hanging on real hard to the wheel to prevent that happening. My stepfather was standing, though, before Daddy threw the first punch. I keep a very distinct image of Hector’s thin-lipped mouth drawing itself into an “o” of surprise as it dawned on him that he was fixing to be hit. Hard, and more than once if necessary.

I would like to say the film clip I’ve shot for myself stops there, for I have seen men fight in the parking lots of certain bars. And always after the first collision of fist with face, or the first spots of blood down a shirtfront, I turned away, thinking myself too tenderhearted to watch. On that day I watched steady, for Daddy’s pounding on Hector made me truly glad.

After he’d knocked Hector down once, he pulled him up to stand again, only to knock him down again. He practically dusted off Hector’s shirt and adjusted his collar before clocking him the second time. Hector went down again easy, his legs swiveling under him like rope. He lay stretched there in the grass. Then Daddy did something I’d never seen him do before, which was to keep beating a fallen man. He sat down on Hector’s chest and started swinging on him steady, pounding hard in the face without reason, for Hector had long since ceased to pose a threat to anybody. I watched Daddy’s back muscles get very specific through his thin blue workshirt the way a boxer’s would on a heavy-bag drill. He kept it up till I heard what must have been nose cartilage crunch.

That noise seemed to stop him. His shoulders dropped. He sat there on Hector’s chest winded a second. Then he stood, staring down at his own bloody hands. He turned them over like objects of great curiosity, as if they belonged to another man and had been sent to Daddy solely for repair or inspection.

At that point I became aware Mother had been screaming. Her words—stored somewhere in my head all the while—came racing back like a tape I’d rewound. “Get offa him, Pete, you’re killing him, Baby. Oh God. Lecia, Mary—somebody stop him—” She shut up as soon as Daddy stood. She didn’t want to rouse him any worse. He looked at her across that yellow car roof and sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, and seemed to mean it, though when he glanced down at Hector again, the fury must have rushed back through him again, for he raised his boot and stomped down on my stepfather’s rib cage. I heard ribs crack with a noise like icy branches going down in wind.

Hector rolled on his side, and I feared he was curling up like a tumblebug would if you’d squashed him too hard playing. But after a while, I saw his mouth suck for air.

Still, all the pity that surged through me that day was for Daddy, for the world of ugly he’d kept inside that came pouring out on my stepfather. In fact, seeing Hector’s face like a slab of veal just pounded with one of those wooden kitchen mallets pleased me no end. Lecia and I moved outside to study him better. It amazed me that he wasn’t dead. His breath was light and rattly. When he rolled over to spit out gouts of blood, you could hear tooth chips hit the sidewalk.

The few times I’d seen Daddy heave up a coffin with other men, he always toted more than his share of weight, doing so with that slow-paced, sweating dignity a funeral requires. That was the bearing Daddy brought to handling my stepfather that day. He helped Mother fold him into the seat with utmost gentleness.

When he turned to climb up on the porch, his face was blank and sweaty. There was a fan-shaped pattern of blood sprayed across his chambray shirt. “Y’all get on in the house,” he said, but his voice lacked any edge. He brushed past me.

I watched the Karmann Ghia head down the street—a streak of canary yellow against the gray tract houses that acted as backdrop. Then I heard the pipes groan in the kitchen when Daddy cranked on the faucet to wash up.

Mother never said that she was coming back to us that evening. Per usual, nobody said spit. But I sensed that she would come back, eventually at least. She had a soft spot for Daddy whipping up on a man who’d spoken to her in disrespect. And back then, heat still passed between my parents. You could practically warm your hands on it.

That evening she dumped Hector at the nearest emergency room, checked out of the room they’d just checked into, and headed straight back to us on Garfield Road. She’d spent or been cheated out of every cent of her inheritance. So she came back not just broke but deep in debt. And she stayed. She stayed with Daddy till his death, stayed well into her own dotage.

The neighbors were folding up their lawn chairs, closing their umbrellas to head back indoors. I shoved into my own house, into the cool dark of its wax-papered windows, feeling something like peace. Daddy’s public ass-whipping of Hector proved to me that my stepfather was a bad man. Our time with him had been a bad time. That was over now, Daddy had ended it. He’d drawn a big line in our lives between that bad time and our future. He was shirtless when Mother came back, and they slow-danced into the bedroom laughing.

When the sheriff stopped by after dark, Mother went to the door naked under her black silk kimono. Daddy wasn’t home just then, she told him. Anyways, there’d just been a domestic disruption—that was the phrase she’d used. She was a terrible flirt, and her eyes while she talked to the sheriff were amused. He took his Stetson off and stood there on the porch while june bugs pelleted the screen and neighbors behind their windows drew back their Priscilla curtains.

Lecia and I hung over the sofa back, still gleeful from the triumph of Hector’s exile and Mother’s coming back. I’d never seen her eyes so green, deep green, green as the sea past the farthest sandbar where the waves start to head out away from the beach to all the unnamed archipelagoes. Her arms were long and white coming out of the vast black sleeves of that kimono. She clutched it closed at her sternum, the black heavy silk bunching
up like an orchid. The sheriff was already backing down the porch when Mother’s last words on the subject were spoken. Here’s what she said before the door closed on that rectangle of night, closed on the red silent siren light whirling across our window, closed like a tomb door sealed over the subject of Hector entirely, for she never mentioned him again:
silliest thing
, she said,
no big deal
, she said, then,
nothing we couldn’t handle.