The Liars' Club: A Memoir Read online

  At first we stayed across the street from that market in an old stucco resort hotel painted a stale pink. For breakfast and lunch, Anna slapped together sandwiches from greasy salami, and ham with white rivers of fat and gristle running through it. They were huge Dagwood sandwiches. She spiked them together with flat toothpicks. You had to disassemble one entirely for even the smallest bite. Then the white bread itself was so tough and dry I needed the better part of a grape soda to wash down a mouthful. After a while, I skipped the bread entirely and lived on papery salami slices and leaves of iceberg lettuce sopped in mayo. I picked this stuff off other people’s sandwiches along with big mealy tomato rounds. That caused Lecia to swat my hand a lot and say I was fixing to draw back a bloody stump.

  Nights, we ate in the town’s one steakhouse, a damp ill-lit place specializing in sprawling slabs of prime rib. There were martinis or Gibsons (plural) to start, burgundy with dinner, and finally a cognac that Mother likened to silky fire going down. Walking across the main street after one such meal, I watched the streetlight bob in the wind blowing down off the peaks. What a godforsaken country, I thought. Mother leaned on Lecia and Hector on me to cross. The sole driver whose headlights slid off my face must have taken Hector, lurching across the road like Frankenstein, for my daddy, which made me want to tap on his windshield and explain things.

  Back at the hotel, they passed out, and Lecia nagged me to brush my teeth. “You don’t want those scummy green teeth like Ray back at the stable,” she said. And I said no ma’am, I didn’t. In the mirror, I saw the wooden button from Hector’s peacoat had pressed a half-moon dimple into one cheek where he’d been leaning on me. I’d always wanted cheek dimples, like Shirley Temple. Lecia spent some time trying to fix a matching one on the other cheek. First, she pinched with her thumbnail till I squealed. Then she pressed the toothpaste lid in the flesh while I counted to a hundred. But we never got the marks lined up right.

  Mother rented a colonial house turned out in chintz and claw-footed mahogany. It belonged to the town’s last bank president (who’d gone to jail, if I remember right, for embezzlement). Lecia and I had never been in a two-story house before. We walked through it whispering, craning up at the high ceilings, the long drapes tied back with silk tassels. We curtsied to each other before sitting stiff-backed on the very edge of the rose love seat to pour fake tea.

  The house had scope. The dining table was long and dusty enough for us to write our names on, with room left over. I pointed out that the twelve matching chairs were like for the Last Supper, minus Jesus. They were deep as dentist chairs, with padded bottoms in royal blue satin. Comedy masks grinned down from the carved corner moldings. In the living room, a baby grand piano sat under a chandelier whose glass teardrops had gone a dull amber. French doors led from there to a small parlor, where Hector and Mother set up their bed, so we’d be less likely to pad in.

  Upstairs, Lecia and I had our own bedrooms for the first time. Mine had a tall cherry highboy with drawers deep as culverts so even the clothes Mother ordered from Denver seemed paltry once I’d wadded them up in there. Lying next to it at night, I always expected one of the drawers to slide open and some midget corpse to sit up. So I got in the habit of crawling in with Lecia. She stayed asleep even if I was bold enough to weave my fingers in with hers.

  The first day of school, we walked till we reached a stretch of black graffiti on the sidewalk. Somebody named Ken blew dead bears, it said. Behind this sentence stood Antelope High, a building of gray cinderblock that was the town’s only school, serving all grades.

  You had to walk past a gaggle of high-school kids smoking to get up the steps. Boys had carved their hair into large doo-dah rolls. The girls wore cat’s-eye liner and beehives. You could smell the hair oil and peroxide ten feet away. In Leechfield the older boys had been crew-cut. Most had worn button-down shirts and cardigans like the teenagers on TV, except for a few farm kids who showed up in clean overalls and brogans. These Colorado kids seemed older somehow. The girls smoked right in public, instead of hiding in the bathroom or behind the skating rink like they had back home. Somebody’s transistor radio hidden in pocket or handbag was playing what sounded like “Louie Louie.” A black-haired girl with unbelievably precise ebony spit curls on both her pale cheeks was doing the Dirty Dog to this song right in front of everybody. She humped the air and held her white frosted lips pooched out. I’d only seen that dance done in Texas at a slumber party by somebody’s wicked cousin from Louisiana. I moved past her all slack-jawed, for I judged that dance the moral equivalent of a strip show.

  We walked up waxed entry stairs to a wall covered with brass hooks screwed floor to ceiling at exact intervals. Sleds were stacked off to one side, next to low shelves for boots. For the first time, I realized I’d get to see snow there. There’d be snowballs and lumpy snowmen and sledding like I’d only seen in books. I resolved to fatten up, maybe even get some Wate-On, which was what Junior Dillard’s brother had ordered from the back of a comic book to beef up for football. He’d later complained that it turned his teeth gray. But I was sick of shopping for baby clothes when vast circular racks of dresses marked “Chubbies” got picked over by the bigger girls. Gray teeth or no, I wanted to make more of myself.

  Lecia tipped my face up with a finger under my chin. She said if I got in a nickel’s worth of trouble that day she’d snatch me bald-headed after school. Then she glanced around to be sure nobody saw before smashing my arms against my sides in what was supposed to be a hug. She went clicking off in her new patent-leather shoes.

  She needn’t have bothered threatening me, for there were no teachers around to get in trouble with. The school had taken up something called self-paced learning, which meant kids worked independently through a progression of reading folders and math folders. Student monitors oversaw the classes. The teachers stayed in the lounge all day smoking and eating from big Tupperware containers they took turns bringing in—brownies and cupcakes and cookies by the boatload. I was put in the fourth grade. But though I could at this instant rattle off my second- and third-grade seating charts without missing anybody, I couldn’t name more than a kid or two from that class.

  The teacher did show up that first day to lead us through the pledge and take attendance. I can still feel the cool weight of her hand—which smelled faintly of Jergens—on my shoulder when she introduced me to the class.

  At my old school, a new kid would have had instant celebrity merely for being from somewhere else. Texan kids would have blitzed her with airplane notes and swarmed over her at recess. These Western kids were more wary. I stood in front of the teacher watching them. Their faces looked back at me blank as dinner plates. By recess, nobody but the classroom monitor—who happened to be the principal’s daughter, a blue-eyed girl with a shiny Dutch-boy haircut the color of brass—could have told you my first name, much less where I’d come from.

  Also in Texas, a whole wad of fourth-graders left unattended for long periods would have upended desks, scrawled nasty words on the board, lit fires in the trash cans. A scapegoat would have been chosen and picked on. Still, that teacher went sidling up the hall away from us with no more than a backward glance. In Antelope, even the dumb kids stayed immobile at their desks for the better part of the day, as if everybody had been given some powerful narcotic. The kids were pasty-faced and indistinct. No one talked, since that got you demerits from the monitor. Too many demerits got you detention, which came in fifteen-minute increments and meant staying even longer in the vacuum of that classroom while the red second hand circling the huge industrial clock face swept away the daylight hours.

  Most kids bent their heads onto their notebooks and tried to sleep. One boy gauged the quality of his day by sleeping on graph paper, then drawing a circle around the drool spot he’d made and comparing it for size and integrity to his drool spot from the day before.

  For a while I went through the reading and math folders to pass time. It was a stupid system, where you moved f
rom one level to the next wholly unsupervised. You even got to grade the tests you’d given yourself. The monitor handed out the answer key and a red pencil stub for x-ing mistakes. So far as I know, nobody ever even checked over my work. But I wouldn’t have bothered cheating, for the tests were first-grade easy. One I remember went something like this:

  Apples come in different colors. Color the apples in the tallest tree green. Color the apples in the next tallest tree red. Color the apples in the shortest tree yellow. How many apples are green? How many apples are red? How many apples are yellow?

  Even I could figure out that you didn’t need to color them in first before counting them. The lessons seemed full of chores like that you could skip. Passing the test for one folder just led to another folder, and so on, into what seemed like an eternity of folders. There were trains traveling at sixty miles per hour toward Cincinnati; there were twelve stalks in each bundle of corn Farmer Brown was selling.

  The teacher can’t have actually stayed in the lounge the whole day, of course, but that’s what I recall. Once some boy stuck a paper clip up his nose and started a great gushing nosebleed. The demerits monitor tended to it. She tipped his head back and balled up his own gym sock over his nostril, an act that brought a brief scurry of ooooh’s from the other kids because the sock was supposed to be rank. I was selected to fetch Mrs. So-and-So from the teachers’ lounge. That involved navigating some concrete stairs down into the boiler room, which was like those horror-movie basements that always got you screaming to the girl in the movie holding the candle, Don’t go down. The furnace clanked when I passed it. The twisty pipes overhead were bound here and there with rags and still dripped sweat. Beyond all that stood the lounge door with a round frosted-glass window like you’d expect to find on a submarine. I put my hand on the brass knob and pulled.

  Inside, the place was solid smoke. All the teachers at that time were women, and stout women at that. Their broad backs faced me, their zippers straining to hold them inside their pastel dresses. Their enormous bottoms spilled over their wooden chairs on both sides. When their faces turned my way, I could see that each lady teacher had an aluminum ashtray all her own. Each had an empty paper plate with a white plastic fork that had been licked clean. And in the table’s center sat the remains of a gargantuan chocolate sheet cake. The piece of baker’s cardboard it had been squatting on resembled a big muddy football field torn up by cleat marks or claw marks. My teacher got to her feet when she saw me, and walked me back to the classroom.

  I moved eighteen reading levels and twelve math levels the first week, a new school record, achieved as much from boredom as ambition. They announced it on the loudspeaker one day after the pledge. I briefly felt that old surge of pride in my chest. But looking around, I caught a lot of eye-rolling from the other kids. Maybe there was some secret class pledge about not achieving overmuch, so as not to up the ante for the other kids.

  At recess that day, a sixth-grade girl everybody called Big Bertha behind her back strode right up to me where I stood in line for the water fountain and slapped my face. She’d drawn back good before hitting me. So I saw the hand swinging at me from a ways off. But the oddness of it kept me from so much as ducking. Once she’d whacked me, it took another second to sink in. I stood there holding my cheek. If I’d been more ready for the blow, I might have fallen down just for dramatic effect. My cheek finally started stinging under my hand. Meanwhile, the water-fountain line dismantled itself. The kids of varying heights gathered on one side of us in a jagged wall, to block us from the teachers’ view.

  Big Bertha’s little pig eyes squinched together with the rest of her features in the center of a vast Moon Pie face. She eventually let on that she’d hit me for making her little sister look dumb in my class. I didn’t even know who her sister was. But I couldn’t resist such a clear shot. So I said her sister didn’t need any help in the looking-dumb department, nor did Big Bertha herself, cow that she was.

  Hearing her nickname spoken right to her face, she backhanded my other cheek. This time I flew into her big body, kicking and flailing. Lecia was at the far end of the playground swinging at the time. She later told me that it looked like a windmill had broke loose from its stalk and hurled right into the soft middle of old Bertha. She was slow, but eventually started landing some good blows upside my head. I was ready to quit when out of some wild instinct, my hands shot up to grab the collar of her blouse. I yanked down hard. And through some miracle, every single white button on that blouse popped loose and fell with whispery little plops into the grass. At the time, Bertha had both her hands dug in my hair, so the rubber bands from my pigtails tore at my scalp. My eyes were slanting up to my ears. My mouth felt like one of those astronaut training pictures in Life where the wind pressure blows his mouth open to show his wisdom teeth. Bertha was so busy shaking my skull that it took her a minute to look down. When she did, she saw that her white training bra stretched over her poochy nipples was laid bare to the whole school, at which point she let me drop and bolted toward the cafeteria doors.

  The upshot of that fight was my right eye going black—the result of her boyfriend’s chunky high-school ring glancing off my face. Mother sent one of her barfly slaves over to the market for a T-bone to press on it and take the swelling out. Then she patted foundation around my orbital bone, and dusted the whole mess with talcum from her fluffiest brush.

  Deeter the bartender was polishing the lipstick smudge off a beer mug with what seemed serious thought. Behind him, the bottles staggered up on their little choir risers—amber and green and clear bottles, and one bottle of luminous yellow chartreuse shining out of the back line like some brand of rocket fuel. I looked across the bar and caught in the mirror on the back wall a long view of my pudgy eye, misshapen and caked with powder. Daddy would have been proud of that eye, I thought, and slid off the stool.

  In the unheated bathroom, you could actually see your breath. I wiped Mother’s makeup off with a glob of toilet paper I’d wetted down using tap water. Then I used the hand drier fixed to the wall to blow my face dry, as much to warm up as anything. Standing there by myself, with my eyes closed and that hot wind huffing down on my features so I could feel my hair stream behind me and some blood start seeping back to my bunged-up eye, I had a sudden flood of homesickness. Once I’d ridden in the back of Daddy’s truck all the way from the beach. The sun that day had made even the nailheads on the floor of his truck bed hot enough to scald your bare foot if you set it down on one. The back of Daddy’s head in his red Lone Star cap had been fixed like an icon in the rear window. I’d turned from him to lean my face up to the sun. The wind itself was hot but somehow kept me from sweating awful much. Still, that night I had a blistering sunburn on my face, which Daddy patted cool with Noxzema. The memory clicked off with the drier, as if the power on it got cut too.

  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 sus
pended 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.