Читать книгу Lit: A Memoir - Mary Karr - Страница 14

You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it.

—George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”

My first therapist’s name was—I shit you not—Tom Sawyer. What are the odds. A grad student Shirley Mink supervised, Tom must’ve been cudgeled into seeing me for the measly five bucks a pop I paid months late, if at all. With his runner’s lanky form, he was usually clad in jeans and hiking boots. His fox-red beard was tamed into the same shape as Freud’s—the color so at odds with his streaky blond pageboy that I wondered if it hooked over his ears.

Twice per week, when I deigned to show up—three times if I’d broken up with some beau or been drunked up enough days in a row to wonder was I finally going insane—I whined to Tom about who to date or whether to go back to school or why nobody published my (infantile, unintelligible) poems.

Let’s go back to your mother, he said for the hundredth time.

Lord, don’t be so Freudian. Soon I’ll find you in a tweed vest and bow tie, those little wire rims.

Your complicated mother. Your absent father.

We’ve been over all that, I said. She’s not like that anymore. I mean, she drinks and takes pills more than we’d like. There are the benders still.

Tell it again.

In language more glib and jokey than I’m capable of now, I crankily told Tom the story for the umpteenth time. How Mother doused our every toy with gas and tossed on a match. Much of the night’s a blur but for her standing over us with a carving knife.

Tom said, You still have nightmares you’ve murdered her.

Usually, my daddy does that with a cleaver—wouldn’t old Sigmund eat that up, so to speak. There’s a Bill Knott poem, I’ve recently killed my father and will soon marry my mother. My problem is, should his side of the family be invited to the wedding …

You joke a lot, but you’re carrying around some very powerful feelings.

Oh, I feel bad enough, awful even, just not about Mother and Daddy.

Let me ask you something. Whose fault was that night?

We’ve gone over this. I don’t know. Probably mine, like I said. I was a pain in the ass. My sister’s to blame maybe a little, but she was older and way less trouble.

For a mother to be expected to show up sane and reliable is the least any kid deserves.

I heated up to defend her. And there, infuriatingly, the scene in the therapist’s office and with my mother just cut out, went blank, like undeveloped pictures accidentally slid through an X-ray.

Which kept happening—therapis interruptus. Whenever Tom probed toward my folks at length, I suffered these dramatic erasures and snapped awake, zombielike, leaving the office for the bus stop, wet face stinging. What had I been blubbering about? Not a shred of the session stayed with me, the same person who found long stretches of movie dialogue or yards of doggerel running through her head.

Once when Walt met me for lunch, I asked if these nonalcoholic blackouts were definite proof I was crazy. Just tell me straight, I said, upending the sugar canister into my coffee. Don’t hold back.

The brain sometimes has a hard time incorporating certain memories, he said.

I liked that he talked about it in physiological terms, to make it feel less like me, more like a car we were staring into the engine of.

So it’s not me—just my brain?

Are you your brain?

Don’t try to trick me into learning something, I said.

Your level of functioning contraindicates serious mental illness.

Only intermittently. I keep setting fire to my life.

Interesting image, he said, knowing my incendiary backstory. Maybe if your mother comes in with you for a session the way Tom’s suggested, you’ll get new data about her hospitalization.

He’s theorized that she’s manic-depressive.

Will she come if you call?

She’d go to a dogfight to get out of Leechfield.

Which was true enough—not that I prewarned her by phone that her florid psychosis was our upcoming topic. Actually, I dreaded her coming, since she might freak out and threaten to hurt herself, as she tended to when pressed toward her walled-off past. She’d been a big one to lock herself in the bathroom with a firearm.

But Mother never showed for the session, and—here’s the kicker—neither did I. Our excuse? We forgot, both of us, two sessions plus a rescheduled third. Just slipped our minds, the event she’d expensively flown up for. Papa Freud would’ve said, There are no accidents.

After she’d gone back, I sat across from Tom Sawyer in a tub chair swiveling side to side, and he was—in a quiet, stiffly midwestern way—pissed. Unless I’d commit to getting better, he wouldn’t treat me, he said. I had to fly down to Texas and make her talk to me.

She’s not gonna kill herself, he said, seeming impatient. You can call me if she starts making those noises. He scribbled out his home number on a card.

Standing, I slung my purse over my shoulder, then I spat out a curse I hadn’t heard since seventh grade: You, Sparky, can take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Then I stalked out.

Only looking back, after decades of shrinkdom, do I realize how radical to the point of bizarre his position was. He was either the genius Shirley Mink thought him to be, or a little wobbly sending me down into the lion’s den to confront Mother.

(In case you haven’t read my early version of the passel of lies my family was built on—yours for a pittance—the broad outline of it needs going over. If you have read it, skip over this part.)

After a conciliatory session with Tom Sawyer—who was blasé about the rolling-doughnut comment—I flew to Texas on cheap standby, in a cargo plane whose pilot wore a World War I flying cap with flaps like Snoopy wore.

At my folks’ house, digging around in the attic, I routed out four wedding rings from a trunk. After days of my relentless nagging, plus a pitcher of margaritas, Mother owned up to having married a few times before Daddy, like maybe about four.

She doesn’t date, she marries, her mother had said of her. Age eighteen—not even knocked up before she’d wed at seventeen—she’d given birth to my brother, Tex, followed a few years by his sister, Virginia. Mother’s engineer husband could afford a nice place in New York, where she pissed him off by taking classes at the Art Students League. Her bohemian streak didn’t suit him. His mother moved up to help with the kids, and one evening Mother came home to find the house cleared to its baseboards, the babies gone. It took her years to track them down in New Mexico, where they were happily in school and calling another woman Mommy. Single, broke, scared, Mother had—on the spot torn up the custody papers she’d brought along.

Then came her marrying spree, as she looked for a husband who’d help her get those kids back. By the time she got to Daddy—who was willing to take them in—they were grown, Tex training for a stint in Southeast Asia.

So my sister and I had reignited that preexisting loss. That was why Mother had gone nuts, not because I kept asking her to make grilled cheese or give me fifteen cents for the Weekly Reader. An old spark had already been burning down the fuse toward her explosion.

After her breakdown, we’d bobbed on unsteadily till I was in grade school, when she inherited a bundle of cotton and banking money from her supposedly middle-class mother, and she divorced Daddy, this time bringing Lecia and me to Colorado. She’d married a Mexican bartender, husband six, buying a bar to boot. Less than a year into that, having spent what may have been a million bucks, Mother had gone back to Daddy, who became the only husband to sign up twice—husband five and seven.

During a handful of stable years, she’d reenrolled in school and wound up teaching art in junior high. But her lost kids never stopped haunting her, she said. Her own mother—my now-dead grandmother—had blamed her.

Once the secret had poured out—the rough patches were gone over—Mother got to wondering about those children. So Lecia hired a Pinkerton detective to track down Tex and Virginia.

My half sister turned out to be a blowsy L.A. blonde with such a taste for pills that I’d bust her eating Daddy’s back-pain meds straight from his bedside drawer. I bought her a bus ticket back to San Diego then, and I never saw her again, though she and Mother talked sometimes by phone.

But I took to my easygoing brother, Tex, right off. He was slim and wiry with hair dark as mine. Finding Mother explained to him the artist streak his engineer father had shipped him off to military school to get rid of. After the service, Tex had gone on a tear with drugs and alcohol, but he’d been in active recovery some decades. It tantalized me to think his sobriety might spill over onto Mother, especially when he decided to relocate his photography business to Texas.

Daddy greeted Tex like a lost army buddy, but he’d grown tired of the story long ago, so—after a few hours sitting around the living room catching up—Daddy drifted off to watch some game.

In movie versions of traumatic secrets, the family walks arm in arm into a field of poppies while the sun paints them gold, which scenario I had faith in. With Tex there, a lot of infection drained off pretty fast. Into the night, Mother sat in the rocking chair in her studio, poking at the wood fire, reviewing the tale for some shifting configuration of Lecia and Tex and me. With each version, a new detail emerged—the snow in her hair as she came into the cleared house; the photo of Tex in a sailor suit she’d hoarded; how thick the custody papers were as she tore them—her hands were sore for days.

For decades we’d watched her portraits start with fluid ocher streaks, marveling as each layer of paint drew from the violent slashes a particular shrimp boat, say, down to its last bolt. So for a week or so, with every retelling, Mother herself got more real. Before I left after ten days or so, she’d moved way closer to the front of her face.

Back in the Midwest, I bounced into Tom Sawyer’s office like somebody who’d thrown down her crutches to start tap-dancing. He’d been so right. It wasn’t my fault, Mother’s madness. Cured, I declared myself.

Not long after, the low-residency grad school in Vermont I hadn’t believed existed took me on probation, no doubt due to puffed-up references from Walt and Etheridge. I kept living in Minneapolis, teaching there. But twice per year I went to Vermont for a few weeks—poetry camp, I called it.

Age twenty-three, I walked into a decrepit mansion on a campus approaching bankruptcy. (The college would officially fold the year I graduated.) The chintz sofas were faded. The French-pleat drapes were missing a few hooks. The white wine came from a gallon jug and left the taste of pennies in your mouth.

To get there, I’d drawn from a grubstake I’d cobbled together trucking crawfish from Louisiana for my sister’s newly acquired farmer husband—the Rice Baron, I called him.

Back then nobody had heard of the teachers whose red ink so bloodied the poems and essays I turned in. Bob still worked construction in the summer to feed his four kids. My thesis advisor, Louise, baked ornate pastries at home, then sold them in local shops or restaurants. Heather had one slender volume and was better known for her wicked pool moves. Frank played jazz piano in a Boston bar on weekends. Ray had almost won a big prize for the dog-eared paperback of stories I’d been hauling around, but he still crashed in a sleeping bag on my floor when he was in Minneapolis. Two brothers, Toby and Geoffrey, hadn’t published their memoirs yet. A poet named Ellen Byant Voigt had gathered up this crew about five years before they started dragging Pulitzers and presidential awards and genius grants in their wake.

Easily the least prepared person to study with this august—if not yet anointed—company, I drank like a fish during residencies. Classes ran all day. Parties went till dawn, and I got to hear storytellers of the first order practice their craft. Ray described how the bankruptcy lawyer he’d stiffed of a fee had taken him to small claims court to try to get custody of Ray’s dog. The outraged judge had said, You’re gonna take this man’s dog?

Back in Minneapolis, the only way to shovel through the heaps of work was to stay sober, which meant living like a nun. Going nowhere booze was served, I slid as if on a greased track between apartment and library and whatever teaching I could scrape up. No more bartending—the temptation to drink would’ve kept me blotto—no more pogoing to punk bands. The one art opening I slipped into for a glance around turned into a three-day binge.

After a few years’ work, I’d reached the final meeting with my thesis supervisor—the Resident Genius, I called her—in a chic French restaurant I’d saved up to take her to. She was an elegant woman with a ballerina’s slim poise and the ability to run a demitasse spoon around a china cup without looking callow. I felt like a charwoman but tried to play it off as if we were equals, telling her all I needed was the right publisher. (How did I dare? I now think.)

I swear, I said, it’s like the magazines installed a machine at my post office that recognizes my address, yanks the poems out, then stuffs them in the return envelope.

Count yourself lucky, she said. You’re still promising until your first book’s out.

It was dawning on me how uphill a poet’s path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I’d choose to be happy.

Setting her spoon down, she said, Don’t worry, she said, You don’t have that choice—which either knighted or blighted me, I’ll never know which.