Lit Read online

  Which had been her standard explanation over the years.

  I know a lot of people, Lecia says. I know a lot of people who’re drunks. I even know a lot of drunks with guns—and grudges. Our mother’s the only person I know ever shot at anybody.

  It seems a nasty side effect of sleeping with her.

  In fairness to her, Lecia says, she sounds contrite.

  Maybe we could check her in the same place as Harold, I say. They could go in on the buddy system, like the navy.

  Later, Tex calls to announce he’s shepherding Harold through the hospital’s recovery meetings, with Mother visiting every day (such loyalty makes me wonder if she makes her alleged weekly visits to Daddy in the home—though they no doubt barely register on him.) Tex can’t keep the bemusement out of his voice when he adds, You’ll never guess what she wound up doing this morning?

  Going to one of those supportive-wives’ meetings?

  Yes, ma’am.

  Like a witch in church, I say.

  Some lady put her off by talking about wiping her husband’s ass, and Mother claimed she got sick to her stomach. Anyway, Harold and I were in the meeting across the hall with all the drunks. Everybody laughing and raising hell. So she wound up crossing over.

  She went to a meeting of sober drunks?

  She did.

  Will wonders never cease, I say. If this winds up taking, I owe you big.

  She’s going to another meeting tonight.

  You’re expecting too much, I say. She’s only there because he is—

  Don’t be too sure, he says. They give out these white chips to anybody sober a day. Desire chip, it’s called. Looks like a poker chip. She raised her hand and stood up in front and got herself one. She raised her hand and said, I’m Charlie, and I’m an alcoholic.

  Tomorrow she’ll wake up and say, I’m Charlie, and I’m the fire chief.

  Tex says one of the lecturers at the detox was the very guy she’d called thirty years back, the guy who said she wasn’t sick enough to be an alcoholic.

  I’d like to give that bastard a piece of my mind, I say.

  But cynical as I try to sound about Mother’s stab at normalcy, I hang up to dial my sister, and together our tough talk gets thinner, the pauses in the conversation longer. We’re starting—reluctantly—to hope.

  Afterward, I go into Warren’s study and lean on the door frame, saying, Mother’s getting sober.

  He glances up, saying, I never thought she drank that much.

  I gape at him, and he says, I know when you were little, she was bad.

  Later, Mother calls, sounding chastened, and I scold her and hang up, for when she’s in no immediate danger of killing herself, I get to spill onto her the black bile I feel.

  Eventually, I get drunk at her again, driving to the liquor store for a bottle of Jack Daniels like my poor old daddy used to drink (no scrap of awareness in the similarity), and I drink it in the garage while flipping through my wedding pictures, where Mother looks walleyed and very pleased with herself. I could drag her behind my car, I think. Instead, I drain the poison that I hope will kill her.

  13

  Homesick

  …Mind like a floating white cloud,

  Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances

  Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance.

  Our horses neigh to each other

  as we are departing.

  —Li Po, “Taking Leave of a Friend” (trans. Ezra Pound)

  Two years after the wedding—five years after we met—Warren meets my invalid daddy on a summer day when the humid Texas air is saturated from the local oil refineries with a fluorocarbon stench that could peel paint. It’s their sole encounter.

  I lead Warren into the urine-drenched air of Daddy’s nursing home with a bluster I don’t feel, hugging the nurses on duty as if we’re long lost sorority sisters. But inside, I’m ashiver with anxiety. For what? What could I expect to go right or wrong between two men with such gulfs between them and such silence inside them—Warren bred to it, Daddy broken to it.

  Amid the other patients in the dayroom, Daddy is sitting with a thin pink blanket over his legs when we walk up. When he sees me, his face tries to brighten, but the dead half of it hangs down. He’s shaking his head with a stiff, persistent fraction of a smile. Truly, he’s a man split in half, neither fully dead nor fully alive.

  His eyes are black as a crow’s, though, and they sparkle and go wet when he sees me.

  Mur, he says, Murr.

  That’s right, I say It’s Mary. I kiss his whiskery neck, asking does he want me to shave him before I leave.

  But he doesn’t register the offer—a relief, since I whinge at inflicting the slightest razor nick.

  His good hand grabs my left hand, grips it with the old iron he had in my youth. I stand next to him while Warren waits off to the side.

  A little old lady in cat’s eye glasses with hair woven atop her head wheels up to me. She says, Are you his wife?

  No, ma’am, I say, wondering if maybe Mother doesn’t visit as often as she’s told us, else this old bird was also too out of things to remember Mother.

  His sweetheart?

  No, ma’am, I say. I’m his daughter.

  Thank goodness, she says. I’m his girlfriend.

  Daddy lets go my hand a second and waves over toward the lady. She wheels to his other side, then puts her hand on one wheel of his chair protectively, saying, He buys me Cokes. He stays with me all day, so I never have to wonder where he’s at.

  He’s good that way, I say.

  He’s never lied to me, not once.

  From the half of Daddy’s face I can see, his old smile is perfect. His eye glances off mine in cahoots. I can, for an instant, see him as he’d been all tall, kneeling down to me, saying, Don’t tell your mama and sister. You and me’ll sneak off for a strawberry freeze…

  I start to move away, and he grasps my hand with a lobster grip. I wave Warren over. Daddy, I say, this is Warren.

  Daddy glances at him.

  Is that your sweetheart? the lady says.

  Yes, ma’am.

  Daddy studies my hand as if it were some codex that needed to be deciphered somehow. He looks up at me, and from a great distance—tens of thousands of miles, decades—it’s as if he’s been fast-forwarded into our presence. Our glances click, and his claw of a hand clings to mine. Murrr, he said.

  That’s right, Daddy.

  He shakes his head and purses his lips. He looks around the room as if for help. The lady says, You’re making him mad, little lady. She pats his hand again. Honey, she says—honey, can I get you a Dr Pepper?

  He half nods.

  All right then, she says and wheels around.

  My chiclet engagement ring’s still loose, only held on by the wedding ring I had fitted. Daddy wiggles the ring on my knuckle. He says, Murrr…murr.

  Married, I finally say. I’m married. Yes, to Warren. He’s my husband. I reach for Warren and draw him over. For a second there, I hold each of their hands, standing like a conduit between them. I’m still looking only at the good half of Daddy’s face. He gives Warren the up and down scrutiny he’d bring to a horse prior to auction, then he glances back at me and rolls his eyes as if to say, jokingly, This yahoo.

  Then he lets go my hand to shake Warren’s, and I take that in.

  And that’s it, that instant. My life as I’ve shaped it includes—for that instant only—the daddy I once loved more than beans and rice. The lady wheels back with a Dr Pepper. I help her flip the tab, and she slides a bent straw into it.

  We take turns buying, she tells me.

  Daddy takes a sip and winks at her. Then he looks over at me, saying, Looooo.

  I love you, too, Daddy, I say.

  At the end of the visit, Warren calls him Mr. Karr and says he’s glad to meet him. And Daddy takes my hand in his and looks down at it and up at Warren. His eyes meet mine, and in a stiff nod, I get his last blessing, since within th
e year, we’ll come back to bury him.

  14

  The Inconceivable Meets the Conceivable

  There was earth inside them, and they dug.

  They dug and dug, and so

  their day went by, their night.

  And they did not praise God,

  who, so they heard, wanted all this,

  who, so they heard, knew all this.

  —Paul Celan, “There Was Earth Inside Them”

  (trans. Michael Hamburger)

  The call comes on the ancient black rotary phone in the middle of the night at the Whitbreads’ Rhode Island beach house. Daddy’s dead. Five years after we’d refused both breathing apparatus and feeding tube, he’d gone on blinking.

  He hadn’t wanted to die, which was contrary to all his stoic-sounding predictions about infirmity. On the back porch one night when I was home from college, he’d issued a long and drunken disquisition about how—if he became bedridden—I should never let some machine pump his lungs with air. He’d said, Don’t you let me linger.

  Frogs were keeping time in air drenched with honeysuckle.

  Your mama and sister won’t do this, but you do it. Get you a pillow and lay it over my face.

  I sipped at my Lone Star beer, which he’d doctored with salt so it was akin to sea water.

  Don’t you feel bad if I struggle.

  I probably agreed just to get him to shut up. But whatever death he’d expected to slump into, he’d fought off.

  On the dawn plane flying to Texas, I feel furious relief that he’s finally gone curling over me like a cold green wave, and in the backwash of that, icy shame. Wave after wave, I’m drenched and shamed that way till touch down on the tarmac between palms and razor grass.

  Daddy’s dead. I no longer have to wander the corridors of corporate America feigning an expertise I in no way have, solely to pay for the bedpans and catheters and the slender white worms of gauze they pack into the bedsores on the backs of his heels as the bones try to cut their way free of flesh.

  He’s dead. They nailed him in a box, and a long conveyor belt rolled him into a flaming oven even before my plane scraped down.

  At the funeral home, I help up the steps my farm girl aunt, Daddy’s sister, who believes that in the final Rapture our graves will split and our bodies arise clothed in healthy flesh. She’s the only relative I felt kin to at a cellular level, and she holds out her shaking, bird-boned hand for me to steady herself, saying, Take me to him. Her milky blue eyes stare through gold-rimmed spectacles bought before Eisenhower.

  Holding the one hand, I explain about the cremation, and her free hand—clutching a thin hankie imprinted with violets—flies to her gaping mouth, and she cries with an agony worthy of Job, You burnt my brother! (Ignorant, I was, till she cried out, of the trick Mother and Lecia had played on me by dispatching me to explain the cremation to Aunt Gladys.)

  After the service at Mother’s house, I’m lowering to the table a bowl of mustard greens salty with hunks of fatback. Lecia asks, Where’s Warren? She’s upending a Tupperware carton of fried chicken onto a platter.

  He’s gotta be in the bathroom, I figure.

  Not long after that, my cousin Jim Ed—wearing, I believe, the same blazer from our granddaddy’s funeral when I was in sixth grade—asks, Where’s your good-looking husband? I’d like to shake his hand.

  Jim Ed has retired from coaching football, and he talks about how Daddy had taught him to catch the pigskin two-handed.

  My favorite cousin, Peggy Ruth, says, That man of yours oughta try these biscuits I brought.

  I know—as my husband does not—that you thumb a hole in a cold biscuit and fill it with a stiff smidge of creamery butter and a lolly gob of cane syrup and bite down so your chin is not spared the squish. And I know that the maple syrup Yankees favor is a paltry stand-in for the burnt-sugar taste you squeeze from sugar cane, whose white inner pulp is sheathed inside purplish-brown bark I can peel with a pocketknife.

  And where is Warren, anyway?

  Outside, the hundred-degree air is sopping. But someone had seen him in jogging clothes, so I look up and down the road edged with bleached oyster shells. Under mimosa trees, I cross the neighbor’s yard, past the garage where I was raped as a child. I come to the culvert I had on the night of the assault imagined my blue corpse floating in (not because the neighbor boy who was the culprit might have thrown me there, but because part of me knew I was already over).

  My silk blouse is wet at the pits, my pencil skirt at the waistband. I long to peel off my pantyhose. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I scan the landscape for Warren’s tall form: he’s nowhere. I’m not so much pissed that he’s vanished, just left town, which—given Mother’s penchant for flight—seems feasible even for Warren.

  Eventually, we call Lecia’s house, and her housekeeper says she let Warren in to shower. He didn’t have a car to drive back to my mother’s so he stayed on. Hours later, when we come in, he’s on the sofa alongside the basketball playoffs with the remote in his hand.

  (Did we fight about this? I can’t dredge it up. I’d started to mistrust what I wanted, since my therapy at the time involved sifting reasonable wants from the nutty ones rearing up from the past.)

  On the plane, Warren and I fly back in a silence that I’ve learned to copy from him, and since birth offsets the agony of death like nothing else, I carry in me the feverish craving of a woman wanting to lodge some luminescent bubble of baby in my middle.

  I take his hand to ask if we can start trying.

  We’re not really in a financial position yet, he says. Maybe if I wind up taking over the curatorship in a year or two.

  He pushes his glasses up his nose and fetches his book from the seat pocket, but I push on, saying, I’m teaching part-time now—a better schedule for a baby. The editing stuff I can do at night.

  We haven’t even started saving for a house yet.

  Why can’t your dad help us with a down payment? I ask.

  Warren looks out the plane window at the arctic of floofy clouds.

  I mean, he could take it from whatever you’ll inherit, no?

  I doubt I’ll inherit anything, he says. There are six children. Just drop it, Mare.

  I can’t accept the fact that Warren’s family ethos reflects Andrew Carnegie’s old saw about how inherited money has to be held back at the risk of withering ambition, but I sit in silence.

  The plane flies on, carrying us in its hull. Warren stares off into the distance the rich enter when talk of money comes up.

  But a woman whose third eye has begun to stare at some invisible baby is incapable of dropping the subject. So at the Labor Day clambake in the Rhode Island beach house—itself four times the size of what I grew up in—after intermittent nagging from me, Warren walks up to the white wicker chair containing his father and asks the old man about helping us when I get pregnant. Only on the drive home will Warren even say aloud that the talk took place. But any details about it stay sealed in that head of his.

  He’ll help us, Warren says.

  The car passes a long stretch of beach roses in bloom.

  How? I say.

  I don’t want to go into it. It’s private.

  I’m your wife, I say.

  At a stoplight before the freeway, he puts the car in park and stares at me, saying, You got what you wanted. Now get off my back.

  (Don’t think he spoke to me this way often. He didn’t, which is why—unfairly—it sticks.)

  At that instant, I stop drinking cold turkey. I don’t remember it being hard. In fact, it’s the last easy quit I’d have. I give up liquor and cigarettes to purify myself for the baby taking cherubic shape in my head long before my body gets to it.

  In some ways, I believe conception will be hard for me. One of God’s little prototypes, Hunter Thompson once said of some ne’er-do-well pal—never even considered for mass production. I pore over books about getting knocked up as if it weren’t standard order for every creature from cat to
cockroach. Warren knows I’m logging my morning temperature, a sharp rise being a sign that you’ve dropped an egg into the chute. The first slightly overheated morning, it so happens that Hurricane Gloria has ripped down the phone lines on our block and shut down the library. Warren takes the bus home early like a man summoned to battle, and a month later, I miss my period.

  Already? he says, staring at me across the huge steaks I’ve splurged on, the half-empty bottle of nonalcoholic wine.

  You’re not excited, I say.

  He considers the burgundy fizz in the glass. Tastes like grape syrup.

  Not about the wine, you bonehead, I say. About the bun in the oven.

  Baby Otis? Warren says. It’s great.

  Pouring him more nonalcoholic wine, I say, You’re upset. You’re not excited.

  He stares across the candlelit table.

  No, he says. I mean, yes. It’s just…

  I’ve Ziploc-bagged the telltale pregnancy thermometer and stuck it in a vase between us, tying it with a ribbon like a daisy. He touches it with a finger as if it might be hot, saying, How reliable is this? I mean, should you go to the doctor or something?

  Despite his slight remove, I think what a perfect dad he’ll make, tempered as he is by gentleness. He once quoted to me Henry James’s three rules: Be kind, be kind, be kind. I’ve observed him with his sister’s kids, patiently tossing the whiffle ball underhand. They climb into his lap for stories.

  But few men—no matter how tenderhearted—go so gaga over the unborn as an inseminated woman will. At night I read one baby book after another, and most spare weekend hours I spend pawing through garage sales for cast-off cribs and baby clothes. And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller.

  At Christmas, his father says he knew I was pregnant when I said no to wine, and many toasts are drunk to my health and the baby’s. My mother-in-law promises to ante up all the baby clothes and linens, and Mr. Whitbread says he’ll cover my half of the rent. But driving home, Warren’s silence fills the car.