Lit Read online

  He drew a snuff can out from under his seat and tucked a pinch in his jaw, saying around it, You dip?

  No, sir, I said.

  He said, Not a pretty habit on a young woman. After an awkward silence, he added, Here’s the real truth, if you can dig it. He reached into the backseat and handed over a bedraggled paperback whose inside-back ads involved books on UFOs and Nostradamus.

  Looks real interesting, I said.

  You believe in presences? he said.

  I lied that I knew ESP and ghosts existed, though I believed in nothing, naught, nada. (When I got to college and found the word nihilist, I’d glom onto it the way a debutante does an alligator handbag.)

  He shook his head. Those are just circus tricks for the weak mind.

  That’s when I noticed that no aspect of this hillbilly matched up with the surfboard lashed on top. Sam’s sunken chest meant his only swimming included water wings. Or—the ghost of reason said to me—when he was weighing down corpses in some black sunken lagoon.

  He said, My granny back in Tennessee was born with the web of a caul over her head like a wedding veil, and I come into this world wearing that same veil. I see what others don’t. I am wed to the truth and a missionary of it.

  He studied me in black-eyed silence for a while. You’re not a Jew, are you? I didn’t peg you for a Jew.

  Me? No, sir. Actually, do you know a good church around here for me and my fiancée? As if, I thought, I’d ever enter a church other than carried by handles.

  He spat in a coffee can and pointed out my window, saying, Look at this cathedral we been give here.

  Sun was spattering the indigo water with silver sequins. Girls who seem to have stepped from chewing gum commercials jogged in bikinis along the shoreline. It was a lobster-salad-eating crowd.

  I said, They say it never rains here hardly at all.

  With two fingers, he stroked the edges of his thick mustache like some diminutive Chinese emperor about to sign a death order. He said, We’re not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy’s assassin. He paused to spit in the coffee can. He said, I can see past this day to the time when these same waves will be made of blood. You believe that?

  Sounds like you know the Bible, I said.

  That I do. I’ve studied on it pretty good. You don’t mind, he said, brightening up—you don’t mind, I gotta make a quick stop by a friend’s house right this side of San Clemente.

  With that statement, his manner altered. He smiled, showing the pointy incisors of a gerbil. Which change hit my adrenal system like jumper cable voltage. He was suddenly trying to be charming. For the first time, I could see how wildly high he was. I must have had heatstroke to miss it. His eyes were tar pits, his body slick with sweat. This wasn’t cannabis sativa high, nor heroin nod-off high, nor John Lennon’s imagine-all-the-people-living-in-one-world high. This was eyeball-boiling, grind-your-teeth-to-bloody-stubs high. In short, crystal meth high.

  Sorry, I said. I gotta make my old man dinner.

  Why, I thought, why didn’t I just go to the midwestern college I’d weaseled my way into early admission, then chickened out of? A premed student I had a crush on went there. At the time school had seemed repellently conventional. Plus the education fund Mother and Daddy had—all our lives—reassured us we’d have turned out to be nonexistent. Mostly, though, I knew I’d fail in such a place, having once secured a D in art class—even, maybe not accidentally, given that Mother was a painter.

  Sam tucked his long black hair behind his ear, the smile still rigid on his face. He said, This is a cool scene. You’ll dig it. My friend used to jam with the Grateful Dead. (A claim ubiquitous among West Coast guitar players circa 1972.)

  Cars zipped by. I bent over and pretended to rummage through my big fringed purse as though I were a woman who clipped recipes. Lifting my knees to block my right hand from sight, I got a tight grip on the door handle.

  He said, This won’t be but a minute.

  We slowed down for a curve, and I scanned the empty road behind us before I hoisted the handle and hit the door.

  Nothing happened. The handle was floppy loose. It could have spun in a tractionless circle like a pinwheel, no connection to the mechanism. Now I knew why he’d been Sir Galahad with the door.

  He downshifted, and the car’s loose hull rattled around us. His solvent breath was so strong, one match and he’d belch out dragon flames. He said, It’s the truth that saves us, but some people’s truth is bitter gall. You’re a woman, Mary, with the curse of Eve on you.

  I wondered where were the ubiquitous squad cars that had plagued my friends and me. The doughnut-munching bastards.

  You wanna see my truth? Sam asked.

  I firmly doubted I had a choice. I said of course I’d be honored to see his truth, wise in the arcana as he seemed to be. Then I waited for him to raise up the hatchet or samurai sword with which he would surely split my skull to the gizzard.

  With some ceremony, Sam drew from under his shirt a suede pouch on a leather cord slung around his neck. Opening it, he drew out a thin object a few inches long and wrapped in red silk with tiny Chinese ideograms on it. On his lap, he unfolded it with one hand—a small brownish-black burnt-looking thing like an umbilicus. A root or charm, I thought.

  That’s my twin brother’s finger, he said.

  I looked at him, white stuff at the sides of his mouth, flecks of tobacco on his bottom lip. I felt my right hand on the floppy door handle.

  Sam had been on a tarmac bagging bodies unloaded from a helicopter fresh from the carnage of the Tet Offensive. He’d peeled back one tarp and looked down into his own face. Which was his brother’s, of course.

  Mary, he said, pray the Lord you never see a face like that. One half was like the inside of a roast you left outside. Just blown slap off. His ear had stayed perfect, though. I wanted something of my brother’s power. And I’d had a vision before I got shipped in-country. In a big cathedral, he was, wearing his dress blues. He was praying over my casket. That’s what was supposed to of happened. Instead, he got his face shot off.

  The wind eked in the window seals, and the car shook. What scared me most was the crying part of Sam had been cauterized already. He was a living scar.

  All my life I’d met people bearing wounds far deeper than my own. I’d thought California would change me, heal me, free me from attracting all that. And now I’d flagged it down and climbed in a car with it.

  We rounded the curve into Dana Point.

  The car lunged up to a light. It shuddered and died. I jammed my skinny arm through the window slot, slick as a length of licorice, and yanked the door open. I didn’t so much jump from the car as eject myself out on the roadside slope. The effort launched me downward, sliding. Over gravel and scrub oak, rocks scraping my shins.

  I could hear Sam crank the dead VW back up to a stunted idle, its ragged engine coughing. I scrambled up the gravel incline, losing a flip-flop in the process, hollering as if somebody at the light might take notice. I raised my head and bawled for some driver to see me, hear me.

  He was calling my name, looking like a guy ditched by his prom date—sweaty and short and like his feelings were hurt. The light changed. Horns. I sprinted across the yellow line before oncoming traffic to the other side of the road. Sam hollered over, Hey, you forgot your pocketbook.

  I was sprinting so shards of rock got embedded in one foot. Even then I was doubting my instincts. Maybe he was harmless.

  By the time the shakes hit, I was speed-walking with a single flip-flop along the road’s shoulder, a kind of inner earthquake starting in my middle—a shaking that spread outward and nearly buckled me.

  At a fish joint famous for not letting the beach-weary use its facilities, I rushed past counter traffic to the bathroom. Soon as I locked the door, I hunched over the sink, washing my unstable limbs with brown paper towels and pink soap as if they belonged to some patient I was paid to tend. The shaking receded like a tide.

  Sometime aft
er that—maybe even the next day—I stopped smoking pot, stopped going to the beach. Sam had spooked from me the notion that the hippies I’d once revered were benevolent characters identifiable by roach clips and tie dye. Plus, the crash pad my friends and I had rented had gotten too raggedy for any girl to stand. The sink stayed piled with scabby dishes from when I’d cooked everybody spaghetti a month before. When you hit the light switch at night, the roaches didn’t even run anymore. Yet night after night the guys lazed around puffing weed and telling dick jokes. When they headed to the beach, I’d lose myself down the valley of a book or scribble longhand on loose pages that I stashed under my sleeping bag.

  College was the thing. I’d scammed my way into that small midwestern school too good for me, but then I’d put it on hold as too square. Now it looked like an escape from flagging down another satanic hobo, or it was suddenly an excuse to read nonstop. I longed for its library walled with books, a desk with gooseneck lamp, a bulletin board.

  Taking my collect call, Mother agreed—her life’s goal being college for perpetuity. She phoned the school’s financial officer, who promised as much in work and loans as I needed. I was sweltering inside the open accordion door of a phone booth.

  You’ve tried it your daddy’s way, Mother said.

  How is this Daddy’s way? Daddy wants me to stay home and hone my pool game.

  Yeah, but the T-shirt factory job, the whole working-class-hero pose. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet some suave intellectual….

  I told her the phone was making my face sweat, but she’d already relaunched into her plan to auction off my unemployable ass to some husband as if I were chattel. She sketched for me an artsy, wire-rimmed guy with a wardrobe of turtlenecks, a shiny car unmarred by the blurring circle of the sanding machine. Which hunk of whimsy failed to account for the fact that I’d bolt like a startled cheetah before such a man—a beast of an unknown phylum.

  On my last day, dropping an armload of ratty cutoffs and salt-crusted bikinis into the apartment complex’s garbage cans, I spied a thrown-out notebook and nicked it for my disheveled pages—for some reason, all unlined typing paper. I used a pen to poke holes into every margin, which seemed to take a long time, hole by hole. It was dusk when the sheets slid bumpily together and the notebook’s silver claws snapped shut. There was sweat on my upper lip.

  I stepped out the sliding door into the dusty odor of eucalyptus, a light wind. Over the valley of orange tile roofs, you could catch just a gray strip of sea from there. I set out walking the hills for the last time. With my ponytailed hair and the sweater tied around my neck like a sitcom coed, I looked into any undraped picture window at the families around lamplit tables, pretending they’d celebrate my homecoming at term break.

  2

  The Mother of Invention

  If Jesus had said to her before she was born, “There’s only two places available to you. You can either be a nigger or you can be white-trash,” what would she have said? “Please. Jesus, please,” she would’ve said, “just let me wait until there’s another place available.”

  —Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

  Mother’s yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming, unrusted tractors glazed cinnamon red. Mother told me how the wealth of these farmers differed from the plight of the West Texas dirt farmers of her Dust Bowl youth, who doled out mortgaged seed from croker sacks.

  But because I was seventeen and had bitten my cuticles raw facing the prospect of fitting in at the private college we’d reach that night—which had accepted me through some mixture of pity and oversight—and because I was split-headed with the hangover Mother and I had incurred the night before, sucking down screwdrivers in the unaptly named Holiday Inn in Kansas City, I told Mother something like, Enough already about your shitty youth. You’ve told me about eight million times since we pulled out of the garage.

  She asked me if we had any more of the peaches we’d bought in Arkansas.

  We got peaches galore, I said.

  The car was fragrant with the bushels of fruit we’d been wolfing for two days while our bowels grumbled. I picked through the soft bottom peaches for an unbruised one to hand her. I asked, Wasn’t that the name of some famous stripper, Peaches Galore?

  Pussy Galore, I believe, Mother said. She bit the peach with a zeal that made me cringe, as did her cavalier use of the word pussy, though I myself used it with alacrity.

  To look at her behind the wheel, with the mess she could make of a peach, appalled me. She was so primordial. She had to wipe the juice off her chin with the back of her hand.

  Out the window, legions of neat corn about to tassel announced a severe order I longed to enter into, one that would shut out the sprawling chaos of Mother.

  She tapped her cup of watery ice, saying, I could use a little dollop of vodka in there. The cup was in its sandbagged holder on the bump in the car floor next to her streamlined legs in exercise sandals. And if, as Samuel Johnson said, everyone has the face they deserve at fifty, Mother must have paid some demon off, for despite her wretched habits, her face looked amazing at her half century—with her shock of salt-and-pepper hair, pale skin, and fine features.

  She said, Don’t look at me that way. We got up at five. It’s cocktail hour by our schedule. We got any more ice?

  I fixed her drink, then lowered myself on the spider’s silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendía family. The prodigal José Arcadio, once stolen by the gypsies, returned wearing copper bracelets and with his iron body covered in cryptic tattoos to devour roast suckling pigs and astonish the village whores with his appetites. The scene where he hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, quartered her like a little bird made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle still marks the instant.

  Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by with all the wholesome prosperity they represent. And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message Mom ½, written in laundry pen, since no one in our family ever stood on ceremony.

  It was sometime on that ride that Mother asked me what was I reading. So lucid is the memory that I feel the power of resurrection. I can hear her voice made harsh by cigarettes asking, What’s in your book?

  This was a hairpin turn in our life together—the pivotal instant when I’d start furnishing her with reading instead of the other way round.

  Her hazel eyes glanced sideways at me from her face, pale as paper.

  I said, A family.

  She said, Like ours?

  Even then I knew to say, What family is like ours?

  Meaning: as divided as ours. We passed some Jersey cows staring at us like they expected us to stop. I said, I wish Daddy had come with us.

  Oh, hell, Mary, she said, upending her drink, rattling the ice in the cup’s bottom. Read me some.

  I tried to explain how little sense the book would make starting from there, and how I was too engrossed to go back. But she was bored and headachey from the drive and said, Well, catch me up.

  It was an old game for us. Tell me a story, she liked to say, meaning charm me—my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me. If I ever wonder what made me a writer—if I tug the thread of that urgent need I have to put marks on paper, it invariably leads me back to Mother, sprawled in bed with a luminous hangover, and how some book of rhymes I’ve done in crayon and stapled together could puncture the soap bubble of her misery.

  On the road that day, I did the same, only with better material, and—no doubt skimming past the sex stuff—I let those elegant sentences issue from my mouth like mystery from a well rubbed
magic lamp. She was rapt. She gasped. She asked me to read parts over. By the time we pulled in to the Minneapolis Holiday Inn, my voice was a croak.

  In the room, I got puking drunk for the third night in a row. Hair of the dog, Mother said. The first screwdriver had smoothed me right out. However expert I was at drugs, I remained an amateur imbiber, yet drink was all I had that night to blind me to the presence growing slurry in the next bed.

  Maybe any seventeen-year-old girl recoils a little at the sight of her mother, but mine held captive in her body so many ghost mothers to be blotted out. If my eyelids closed, I could see the drunk platinum-blond Mother in a mohair sweater who’d divorced Daddy for a few months and fled with us to Colorado to buy a bar. Or the more ancient Mother in pedal pushers might rise up to shake the last drops from the gasoline can over a pile of our toys before a thrown match made flames go whump, and as the dolls’ faces imploded so the wires showed through, the very air molecules would shift with the smoke-blackened sky, so the world I occupied would never again be fully safe.

  I had to sit up and breathe deep and make my stinging eyes wide so all the shimmery-edged versions dispersed, and she once again lay in filmy underpants and a huge T-shirt with jagged writing on it announcing HERE COMES TROUBLE.

  She said, You can’t go now. I’m not done with you yet. Sob sob sob. She had on one of the derby hats she’d bought each of us in Houston the day we left—pimp hats, they were, trailing long peacock feathers in their brims.

  Later, Mother patted my back as I threw up into the toilet. I remember the smell of Jergen’s lotion from her hands, and how the tenderness of her gesture repelled me even as part of me hungered for it. I passed out sending prayers up at machine-gun speed, like a soldier in a foxhole to a god not believed in, Don’t let me be her, don’t let me be her. For however she’d pulled herself together for this trip, she could blow at any second.