The Liars' Club: A Memoir (6 page)

So it was that my mother’s fevered two-year-old self was stuffed
in a bright red coat and propped out on the open front porch on a freezing January afternoon. Mother said that she saw the whole sky through a gray curtain. She remembered the wind blowing full tilt at her from the west like a wide white hand of hard air slapping toward her face. There were no breaks or hills to interrupt the wind from its long slide off the northern Rockies. It hit her from across a thousand miles of flat-assed nothing. In the foreground you can see a spotted cat appear to rub its hind parts on Mother’s shins. This gives the whole picture an aspect of haste. Mother doesn’t smile. She said that she didn’t feel like she was fixing to die or anything, only that a wooziness made her want to lie down but people kept standing her up.

What made this story endure in our family is that it ends in a miracle. When the preacher arrived the next morning, dressed in his freshly brushed black coat and ready to give comfort, Mother was sitting upright in bed rolling up rag dolls from old quilt scraps and still sucking whiskey off the rock candy her daddy had gone into town to buy her at the crack of dawn. Grandma liked to say later that it was the fresh air that healed her.

Our only visit to my grandmother’s house in Lubbock is seared into memory for me by Mother’s first serious threat to divorce Daddy. I don’t remember what they fought about that morning, only that at some point she chucked a pot of oatmeal against the yellow kitchen tiles, grabbed her straw purse, and pulled us out to the car without even bothering to change us out of our pajamas. I do remember that before Lecia would agree to go into Stuckey’s for breakfast, Mother had to buy us new dresses. (Even then, my sister had a sense of propriety I lacked: if I wet my underpants playing, back then, I just stepped out of them and kept running.)

Somewhere past Dallas that afternoon, we stopped again for a paper bag full of fifteen-cent burgers. Lecia and I had been playing Jewelry Store in the backseat, which involved my giving her real money for fake jewels. She kept a red fruitcake tin stuffed with buttons of every conceivable shape and material, including rhinestone and brass love knots. I had started the trip with a stack of dimes I’d collected in a glass cigar tube from Daddy, and a click-open
plastic Barbie purse full of pennies. By Fort Worth, Lecia had taken nearly all the dimes by arguing that since they were littler, they were worth less. That was the kind of transaction that marked all our games. (Lecia went on to make an adult fortune selling whole-life insurance in Houston.)

Anyway, I was down to pennies, and she was down to trying to pawn off plain white plastic buttons as pearl when the afternoon sky first went dark.

Out in West Texas, the sky is bigger than other places. There are no hills or trees. The only building is an occasional filling station, and those are scarce. How the westward settlers decided to keep moving in the face of all that nothing, I can’t imagine. The scenery is blank, and the sky total. Even today you can drive for hours with nothing but the hypnotic rise and slope of telephone lines to remind you that you’re moving. So the sky getting dark was a major event, as if somebody had dropped a giant tarp over all that impossibly bright wideness. You could still see the water mirage lying in the middle of the blacktop road a ways ahead, but the sky it reflected had somehow gone all dirty brown. We looked up. Lecia pointed out a dark cloud racing toward us. It was strange. We’d seen tornadoes, but this was different. Instead of blue-black, this cloud was the color of an old penny, and it was wider, slower, not at all cone-shaped. It still seemed far off when handfuls of locusts began to spatter against the windshield like hail. You could hear the hum of wings as the cloud got closer. Then the world outside the car went black so fast it seemed the sun had been blown out. It didn’t start slowly and build the way normal storms do. By the time Mother got us pulled over, I was crying, and the cloud had more or less enveloped the whole car in a deep crust, a sheet of locusts. They made an eerie roachlike clacking noise that multiplied about a million times in my head. Mother scrambled to close off the side vents, but some of them got inside anyway. That set her saying
Oh my God oh my God
and me screaming as I hunkered down in the black well of the backseat in the duck-and-cover posture we’d learned for the atom bomb. Lecia was quicker to the take than we were. She started
smacking locusts with her flip-flop, calling each one a name: “Take that, you
sonofabitch
,” she’d say. Weird, but after that she was terrified of cockroaches like nobody else. Just the sight of one—and you had to shake them out of your shoes in the morning, down there—would send her climbing up the bookshelf and wailing. She could gut a coon or skin a snake without a wince, but flying roaches drove her nuts, which is odd because she seemed fearless that day, going after the locusts.

After a while all the flying around in there stopped. In fact, everything seemed to stop. The day itself stopped. Lecia elbowed me in the head to shut up my crying, so I did. Then for a long time there was just that clacking, humming sound.

They passed as fast as they had come. Lecia nudged me again, to look, and I lifted my head from my folded arms just in time to watch them peel away from the back windshield. You could see the cloud assemble and thicken before your very eyes. All over the inside of the curved back windshield, there were splats of locust goo with legs and antennae kind of spronged out, and a few hairy legs still flailing. Other than that, you could almost forget they were individual bugs at all and just look at the cloud. It rose up and seemed to shrink away, and blue sky appeared around it, and the humming receded. On either side of the road were bare fields, and it was that strip of naked road we followed to the outskirts of Lubbock and Grandma Moore’s house.

Grandma never did sugarcoat her opinion of Daddy. In fact, any skills she had at sweet-talking or diplomacy were said to have died with my grandfather, decades earlier. She said something about Mother coming to her senses, then immediately set us all to work putting up an evil sweet relish she called chowchow. Open jars cooling on all the cupboards steamed up the whole farmhouse. I was a fairly lazy child, unaccustomed to chores, and it seemed Grandma always had peas to shuck or stinging cucumbers to pick or some big piece of furniture we had to buff real hard. So I tended to drag-ass and generally make a poor impression, whereas Lecia thrived on instruction.

My memory of that day drifts into focus again with all four of
us in Grandma’s bathroom, which seemed vast as a barn. The old woman was just out of the tub and dabbing drugstore powder all over herself with a big yellow puff. When I was little, she’d given me an enema once, and I could never look at her without fearing her bony strength. But naked, her body put me in mind of something real easy to hurt, like a turtle without a shell. Stripping down came more naturally to Mother. This was back when women’s underwear was like armor: the bra cups were rocket cones, and the hose stayed shaped like somebody else’s legs when you took them off. Mother wiggled out of her long-line girdle, which immediately shrank up with a dull snapping noise at her ankles. Why she wore that thing I don’t know, because she hated a girdle in summer like nothing else and sure didn’t need it. The diamond-shaped control panel left a mean imprint on her belly, where there was also a slanty scar from when I’d been born. (I had been a difficult birth, feet first,
like Caesar
, Mother liked to say.) She stepped into the steamy water with a grace she must have learned modeling for life study classes during art school in the forties, all flowing lines and violin curves.

I was sitting on the toilet waiting for my own bath and fiddling with one of Grandma’s hair clamps. Grandma had cocked her hip out and leaned it against the bathroom sink while she crimped her lead-colored hair. She used these steel clamps with little teeth that made deep marks on my index finger as I played with them. Grandma had told Lecia to rinse out Mother’s stockings in the sink, but Lecia was idly playing at fitting her arm inside one and peeling it off like a snakeskin. So Grandma kept cutting her a look as if to say,
Get on with it.
Every now and then, from my spot on the toilet, I’d lean out and try to snatch the other stocking away from Lecia, but she was way too fast.

“You can’t keep raising these children like heathens, Charlie Marie. The little one can’t even tie yet.”

I don’t remember making any defense of my shoe-tying disability. I just stood up from the toilet, pulling up my white underpants, which had little red apples printed all over them. Lecia
had learned to tie at three. Grandma had even taught her how to tat lace by the time she was five. (Tatting is an insane activity that involves an eensy shuttle, thin silk thread, and maniacal patience. Belgian nuns are famous for tatting, it turns out.) Lecia had immediately generated half a dozen doilies, which Grandma had draped over worn spots on the sofa. In my hands, even the simple Jacob’s ladder that any kid in Vacation Bible School could make went all tangled. No matter how many times I was shown, my brain refused to hold on to the pathways necessary to tying a shoe bow. I was thought not so much boneheaded as stubborn on this point.

Mother lay soaking in the tub with a mint-green washcloth over her face. Her mouth made a dark spot in the terry cloth as she breathed. I always associate my grandmother’s house with Mother’s silence and the old woman’s endless bossy prattle. “Now this here is Crisco,” she said, cold-creaming her face. “You should never let anybody sell you anything else. They squeeze a couple of eye-droppers of perfume in it, and Charlie Marie will buy a tablespoon for a dollar. She just wants to throw money away! Do y’all still have those clay banks I got you down in Laredo?” At some point, Mother said the water was like ice, and would I hand her a robe.

The next morning, we drove out to visit Mother’s cousin Dotty, whose husband, Fermin, ran a cotton gin in Roundup, Texas. She had a sprawling white ranch house with so many bedrooms that none of us had to double up. Lecia and I had never been inside a house so fancy. There was a pool in the back and a storm cellar that a cleaning lady kept swept clean and stocked with jars of vegetables Dotty didn’t have to deal with till she forked them up to eat. Her daughter, Tess, had a pink Princess phone by her bed and kept her toenails painted frost white. Dotty’s son, Robert, wore a tie to his church school.

When you have relatives who farm, the first thing that always happens on a visit is a tour of the crop or the livestock or what-have-you. Other people trot out photo albums or new patio furniture or kids’ trophies. With relatives who farm, it’s almost
impolite to ask about any of these things first. You get to them after lunch.

We took the farm road down through acres of cotton. The field was in full bloom. It almost made me dizzy the rows of plants rushing by. Each row ticked past as if marking time, and yet they all seemed to come together at one still point on the horizon. Dotty said it was a miracle that the locusts didn’t bother them at all this year. The same way tornadoes cut narrow paths—so an outhouse would be left standing alongside a house blown to splinters—the locusts chewed up fields at random. They’d left this one alone.

Grandma told how her daddy had farmed her out to chop cotton that looked just like that by hand when she was still a teenager. Her sister Earle had to go to work in the fields too, but the three other girls stayed home and took singing lessons. They were pretty and expected to “make good marriages,” which didn’t mean they’d be happy, only that they wouldn’t have to farm. The sepia portrait of all five sisters in Grandma’s parlor photo shows five wispy blondes. Their seeming frailty made it nearly impossible to believe that the two youngest had been rented out to sharecroppers. They wore eyelet-lace necklines and had those loose-blown Victorian roses pinned to their slouchy Gibson girl hairdos. They were pale, translucent, and somebody had tinted the picture slightly so that their cheeks and the roses were a faint peach color.

In the middle of the cotton field, we stopped Dotty’s Cadillac and climbed out of the air-conditioning. Up close, the plants were near black and spidery-looking. Each one had dozens of cotton bolls exploded in little clouds, each boll shot full of long skinny brown seeds. Grandma pulled one loose and expertly plucked out the seeds till she had a mass of pure fluff in her hand. She showed Lecia and me how to draw a thin thread out of it like spider silk by rolling the strand between thumb and forefinger and pulling just so.

Cotton was a mean crop, I recall her saying, like most money crops. It sucked a lot out of the ground and even more out of
those who worked it. When I grew up and read Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, much of the first volume was devoted to how hard life in that part of the country was on a woman in the Dust Bowl. Water was so scarce that the average thirty-year-old had a dowager’s hump from toting buckets up to the house several times a day. Their faces wrinkled from too much sun, and their hands grew hard as boot leather. Every family buried a couple of kids, too, and that made them hard inside. Thinking of Grandma’s picture in the gold oval frame above Mother’s bed, I tried to imagine someone choosing those girly white hands of hers to do field work, but never quite fathomed it.

We stood in this field in our Sunday visiting clothes, Grandma dabbing at her temples with a hankie. About a stone’s throw away, there stood a barn and tall silo aswarm with Mexican workers. At some point, Grandma announced that Dotty had sure made a good marriage, which judgment wasn’t lost on Mother, I guess. She got all quiet. Then she took her sketch pad and a stub of charcoal from the backseat and wandered off to the barn. When I tried to follow, she squatted down and said to stay with Grandma. This caused Lecia to mouth that I was a baby, and subsequently I tossed a pebble at her kneecap, so Grandma clamped her bony hand on my shoulder and made me go sit in the hot car by myself.

On the way home, we pulled up to the barn to pick up Mother. The door to Dotty’s Cadillac made a big impression on me: it must have weighed a hundred pounds, and also lit up like Broadway when I heaved it open. Mother was talking soft Spanish to two guys studying her sketch pad. One of them quickly tucked a pint bottle of clear liquid into his back pocket. You couldn’t smell liquor on her when she got in, but she had that clipped, Yankee way of talking she always got when she’d had a few. She must have done ten thousand such sketches in my childhood, but for some reason, that drawing stays with me: a hasty sketch of the older man in a sombrero, done in bold scrawls with few shadings, his face withered up. She pulled a can of Aqua Net hair spray out of her bag and sprayed the sketch to fix it, then snapped
shut the pad. It bothered me that nobody else asked to look at it.